


Brothers In Arms

by Nagaina



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Hanzo is somehow the calm voice of reason, Multi, now containing one hundred percent more smut, shameless angstwhoring, this is what happens when Blizzard taunts me with insufficient backstory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-07-23 17:36:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7473477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nagaina/pseuds/Nagaina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, Jesse McCree could count on the fingers of no hands how many people he believed could actually change the world for the better -- and then he met someone who convinced him otherwise. Of course, the world proceeded to disagree pretty damn vigorously, and matters have been noticeably unsettled since, but that's no reason not to take another shot at doing the right thing, particularly when it includes the chance to pay back the heaviest debt he's ever owed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: No Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy

Pure and perfect darkness released its grip slowly, red-splashed black giving way to a swimming misty gray behind his eyes, inside his skull, growing slowly brighter and brighter until his mind clicked back on, like flipping a switch, and his body realized, very much to its surprise, that neither the brain that gave it its marching orders nor the assorted subsidiary bits and pieces attached thereto were actually dead. Given that not-dead was his preferred state of existence, this was a reasonably satisfactory state of affairs. Less satisfactory was the absolutely _skullfucking_ headache his return to the land of conscious sensation permitted him to experience in its full red-hot-icepick-to-the-eyeballs glory though, if pushed to the wall and forced to admit it, he’d have to say that even the pain was a reasonably welcome development under the circumstances. And as to the circumstances…

Jesse McCree slit one eye open the barest of fractions and found himself looking up at a poured concrete slab ceiling, wanly lit by some pale source outside his immediate field of vision and painted a shade of grayish-brown he associated from his misspent youth with the inside of not-yet-vandalized holding cells and his misspent adulthood with the walls of interrogation rooms carefully decorated to lull their occupants into a false sense of security, the belief that no one really got their brains splashed all over walls colored the precise confluence of gray and beige. _Taupe_ , he seemed to recall someone calling it once, and his aching head latched onto that with a completely ridiculous rush of relief, the insides of his skull swirling dizzily, given the number of times he’d had to order the clean-up crews to scrub cranial matter off walls that precise hue. It occurred to him, as he lay there contemplating the now suddenly very suspect ceiling, that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t as okay as the whole being conscious and in pain thing would otherwise indicate. He let the eye fall closed again and did absolutely nothing for several moments thereafter but breathe -- breathing in peace and breathing out stress, as his partner would have put it, seeking a calm center of clarity that would allow him to think about something other than fugly institutional paint jobs and how pleasant it would be to have his own brain spread across one if it meant the headache would go away.

Breathing, as it turned out, helped. (Hanzo, had he been there to witness the admission, would no doubt have found it worthy of that little told-you-so smirk he sometimes broke out when he was indisputably right about something.) The worst of the headache slowly receded under the influence of slow, steady breaths, in and out, and just as slowly his head began to clear, his thoughts began to settle and, as they did, he realized he knew the symptoms, recognized what had happened. Dizziness, lightheadedness, inability to concentrate or focus attention, indicators of oxygen deprivation. The headache, too, if he’d blacked out and whacked his head as a result. No nausea, or tinnitus, which at least argued against a concussion, though his tongue felt two sizes too big for his mouth and his mouth itself tasted like cold iron filings and burning blood and suddenly he knew, knew exactly what had happened, remembered the sensation of inky coils of something too solid to be smoke, too ephemeral to be pulled away wrapping around his throat, forcing their way past his lips, choking and silencing him in a single stroke, vision tunneling and graying out, someone catching hold of him as the floor rushed up at his face. He calm-stress breathed for a few more minutes after that, forcing his heart-rate to come back down from a gallop, and opened his eyes fully to take stock of his surroundings in the knowledge that, had he been anything other than alone, someone would have responded to all the panting and gasping and little involuntary noises he’d been making in one way or another.

He was, in fact, alone and the room was, indeed, painted interrogation-room-holding-cell taupe, a cement walled, floored, ceilinged shoebox longer than it was wide and he knew exactly what it was without even having to think twice about it. Back in the day -- the day being the mid-twentieth-century -- nearly every major city in Europe had at least a handful of these scattered around, mostly buried beside or beneath major transit hubs, government buildings, centers of industry, in the event of the Cold War suddenly turning hot and a hard nuclear rain falling from the sky, places where the lucky few could take shelter and wait for a slower death by starvation once the rations ran out and radiation sickness once the strontium byproducts leached into the water and made their way into the ventilation systems. Proof that the governments of the time were doing something to “ensure” the “safety” of a pitiful number of their citizens, when the largest of the publicly accessible shelters would hold three thousand crammed cheek to jowl and the entire metropolitan population numbered in the millions. Even after the thaw, the theoretically post-nuclear peace, the fallout shelters had remained, the subject of urban exploration and the more morbid forms of tourism and intermittent governmental discussions about repurposing them over the objections of concerned historians. Invariably, nothing came of any of it, and more than a few of them were “lost,” forgotten in favor of larger, more easily accessible facilities that could be turned into historical attractions, leaving the rest to become something else -- de facto homeless shelters, underground haunts for ravers and tweakers, and sometimes, just occasionally, something close to their original purpose.

In its heyday, Blackwatch had had a dozen installations scattered across the globe, primarily concentrated in areas Overwatch coded as high risk: the chunks of the planet that took the worst of the beating and subsequent fallout from the Crisis, states that had failed for any number of reasons, contraband primary transit zones. Overwatch, as the parent organization, knew about all of them, the best to offer direct support to their intelligence-gathering arm or when a problem required more than the minimum application of force. Only a handful of the highest ranking officers in both organizations knew about the green-and-yellow zone Blackwatch listening posts, smaller but far more numerous than the fire stations, of which this was most definitely one, right down to the goddamned taupe paint impregnated with nanoparticulate emitters that helped suppress the ability of external observers to detect incoming or outgoing comm transmissions from orbit, a passive aid to the electronic countermeasures equipment sitting on the work surface at the far end of the room, next to the communication monitoring arrays that, when used by someone who knew how, could penetrate even the most secure high-level governmental networks. Blackwatch’s fire stations were torn down even faster than the Watchpoints, once everything went to Hell, representing as they did the fact that, protestations by the Security Council to the contrary, nobody had ever had total control of Overwatch and containing as they did the end products of decades of research and development of the sort diametrically opposite the ones that resulted in biotic fields and emergency medical nanoclouds. He had long suspected that most of the listening posts escaped that treatment for the same reason that most of Europe’s lost fallout shelters had stayed lost for decades -- that being, most of the people who’d even known of their existence were dead.

At the far end of the room, the communications monitor array and its linked electronic countermeasures rig hummed quietly in the green, powered up and running, even though the monitors themselves were, at the moment, blacked out. A single chair sat in front of it, unoccupied. Against the far wall stood the storage locker that, should he open it, would contain more or less everything a Blackwatch operative would require to function in the field: weapons and ammunition, commlinks, both standard issue personal body armor and civies appropriate for the locale and at least one or two seasons, a fully stocked emergency medical kit (field surgery variety), high energy density rations that would keep body and soul together if never win any Michelin stars. His hat, sans the Blackwatch badge he had never surrendered, hung from the uppermost corner facing him. Next along the wall was a cot, neatly made in hospital corners, bolted to the floor, identical to the one he himself was stretched out on. Entryway, the lock engaged, beyond which he knew would be a source of potable water, minimal but basically adequate sanitary facilities, and a bare minimum of four separate ways out of the immediate area, at least one of which wouldn’t come above ground again until it was somewhere well beyond the metropolitan limits. Two dim lights hung near the jointure of the ceiling and the closest wall, a filter-covered ventilation grate breathing cool-bordering-on-cold air into the room between them. Standard layout for a two-man, long-term observation post, Blackwatch agents being deployed solo only in extraordinarily specific contexts, for particularly sensitive missions, where it was better to potentially expend the fewest assets necessary.

_Fuck,_ the thought articulated itself, heartfelt and fully sincere, as he tried to move and found that he absolutely could not. _Fuck a fucking duck._

He could lift his head, just a bit, and so he did, wincing as the motion sent a sharp pain stabbing through his neck, along the length of his jaw. Centered, point in fact, at the junction where Doc Ziegler had injected the subcutaneous tracking device/comm implant he could, in theory, should have been able to activate by tightening his jaw muscles just so, to silently alert the rest of the team of his location and, if necessary, signal for rescue. At the moment, however, he felt no comforting little nugget of comms technology nestled under his skin -- the slightly sore, slightly swollen incision where someone had _cut it out_ and then repaired the damage, covered it with a square of skin-close bandaging, but not actually the thing that would have allowed him to call in the cavalry. The rest of him was numb from the neck down, numb in a way that didn’t argue for chemical interference, and a slow rotation of his head and the firmest press back against the pillow he could manage told the tale of the neural-impulse repression collar stuck to the back of his neck between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae with surgical adhesive. It wasn’t quite whole body paralysis but it was a close enough cousin, disruption that slowed voluntary neurological processes to a crawl while leaving autonomic functions undisturbed and, in his case, turned his left arm, controlled by the complex interplay of his own nerves and the cybernetic control functions wired into his brain along them, into completely unresponsive dead weight. Nonresponsive dead weight that was, nonetheless, manacled to the frame of the cot without a single micron of play to work with even if he could move it. So was the right wrist, and both ankles, the sensation slowly trickling up letting him know that, underneath the blanket tucked around him, he was barefoot. No boots in sight, or his gunbelt, or his armor.

Standard Blackwatch field doctrine when it came to the treatment of high-value targets containing potentially useful information, death being messy and difficult to undo, was to keep them alive and immobilized using neuro-disruption technology when it was available, chemical sedation and physical restraint when it was not, until they could be removed to a secure location for interrogation. He wished he found that more comforting than he did.

The door chimed, a rising-falling minor key note, and the lock disengaged. A ghost kicked it open and walked through it, incongruously loaded down with a pair of canvas grocery bags in one hand and an armful of styrofoam carryout boxes in the other. Also incongruous: the deep-hooded but otherwise workaday oilskin coat, still beaded with moisture and bits of melting snow, the obnoxiously bright red knit scarf wrapped around its throat and the of the lower half of its face, the goddamned galoshes leaving puddles of slush on the uncarpeted floor. Even more incongruous, the superlative form of incongruous if he was going to be completely honest with himself: the fact that the ghost was alive at all.

The ghost’s gaze settled on him and, in the indirect light and with that bright, blood-colored scarf around his neck, one could mostly be forgiven for suspecting a trick of both things were responsible for the flash of crimson that lit up his eyes, the darkness where the sclera should have been. “You’re awake.” Another flash, a perfectly white crescent of smile against his skin, naturally dark, at least, except the bits that were the ashen gray of a badly charred corpse. “I hope you still like jaegerschnitzel, McCree, because the little old lady that hooks me up thinks I have a starving artist at home.”

Not for the first time, Jesse McCree wondered exactly how his life had come to this. He suspected that it really wasn’t going to be the last.


	2. Wretched Hives Are the Best Kind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jesse McCree, former Blackwatch operative, internationally wanted fugitive, more than occasional vigilante dispenser of overdue justice, thought his life could not possibly become more complicated than it already was. He was utterly, tragically wrong.

Jesse McCree woke to the sound of rain not so much drumming as rolling across the roof and the windows in violently percussive waves, the sudden awareness that he was alone in bed, and with a sensation he was inclined to describe as a _sense of impending doom_ squatting on his chest like something out of a Fuseli painting. The one he could put down to the fact that it was August, August in Macau, and that meant monsoon-force thunderstorms rolling through on a daily basis, at whatever hour they damn well felt like, sending tourists running for the safety of the nearest casino or restaurant and the locals rolling their eyes heavenward. The other indicated that, as usual, Hanzo had woken up first and turned off the alarm clock, as was his custom, so he could have a little solitude first thing in the evening, which was also his custom. Jesse was inclined to put down his ability to slink out of bed without waking him to a childhood spent learning the essential skills of a stealthy night-killer and a young adulthood refining them to exceptional levels, for he was not, in general, a deep sleeper unless rendered involuntarily senseless. Hanzo _also_ tended to ghost about their little apartment with most of the lights out, also down to the aforementioned stealthy night-killer skills and his desire to keep in practice when it came to using them, a personal quirk Jesse considered a damned nuisance every time he found an inconveniently placed piece of furniture with his shins or toes on the way to the bathroom. In the dark. Such as now.

“‘Zo? You home?” Jesse called, sweetly, as he massaged the toes that had discovered the leg of the sitting/dining/room of all work table that was actually two inches further to the right than he recalled.

“Do not call me that,” Hanzo replied, serenely, from down the short corridor that separated the bizarrely capacious kitchen from the rest of their living space. “Breakfast will be ready soon.”

Which was Hanzo’s polite way of saying, _make yourself reasonably presentable, you poorly socialized hellion lout_. Not that he would ever actually say so out loud, he was entirely too well-bred for that, but they both knew he thought it regularly and, frankly, Jesse found it strangely soothing to be so well understood for a change. He showered cold, because even with the apartment’s noble little AC unit cranking for all it was worth the air was thick with high summer humidity abetted by the rain, considered shaving for the meeting they had scheduled for later in the evening and decided that everyone involved had already seen him far, far scruffier, wrapped a towel around anything that would scandalize someone’s grandmother and padded back down the hall. Hanzo had, thankfully, turned on at least one of the sitting/dining/working room lamps during the process of laying out a meal that he metaphorically referred to as “breakfast” (since it was the first meal they’d eat) even though it was well after dark local time and he cherished some deeply held opinions about what constituted proper food for assorted hours of the day, opinions he was deeply loath to compromise except under the most dire of circumstances. The first dire circumstance had, it turned out, been beverages of choice, a discovery made after attempting to get Jesse to function without coffee for a whole week running, the results of which had not been pretty for anyone concerned and which had resulted in an unplanned decampment from their prior digs, the local authorities in pursuit. (Or at least Jesse chose to blame his involuntarily decaffeinated state for that clusterfuck since the alternative explanation -- they’d been in over their heads from the start and hadn’t realized it until it was too late to do anything about it -- made for a significantly less amusing story, all things considered.) There were now two pots on the table, one containing jet black Sumatran Lintong arabica and the other Hanzo’s favorite Iron Goddess of Mercy, and together the twain met over a spread containing steamed brown rice (breakfasty), miso soup (homemade using a family recipe handed down to him by his grandmother -- Jesse had once made the mistake of suggesting it would be faster to use some of the prepackaged stuff, in the presence of both Hanzo and his kid brother, Genji, and realized only after the fact that he’d avoided being simultaneously shivved by the Brothers Shimada because they were both too deep in some variety of terrifying Japanese grandmother post traumatic kitchen stress flashback to appropriately respond to the severity of that insult), komatsuna tamagoyaki (Hanzo was teaching him how to speak properly grammatical Japanese one meal at a time and, in his estimation, he had reached the general proficiency of a second grader from Osaka), a selection of tsukemono and kobachi (including the cucumber-and-thin-sliced-daikon salad Hanzo knew he liked, the bite of which reminded him wistfully of some of the cooking back home), and a nabe pot containing a melange of thin-sliced beef, cabbage, tofu, mushrooms, and noodles, swimming in a broth that was good enough to be a meal all by itself. And all of it arranged in a manner that could be justly described as elegant, artistic even, on plates that Hanzo insisted had to match, and the most comestible of which was Hanzo himself, sitting seiza on an embroidered cushion with a towel still wrapped around his hair and wearing nothing but the blue cotton yukata that brought out the color of his eyes. To think, when they’d first hooked up together, that he’d only been glad to have a partner who could shoot straight.

Hanzo poured for them both. “ _Konbanwa, watashi no gakusei_.”

They spoke Japanese over the table -- to help his fluency, Hanzo insisted -- and Jesse grinned lazily at him in response. “ _Konbanwa, itoshii anata_.”

Hanzo’s left eyebrow twitched, ever so slightly. “ _Sensei_.”

Jesse took an equally lazy sip of his coffee. “ _Konbanwa, saiai no sensei_.”

“You are incorrigible,” Hanzo informed him severely.

“Y’all love it,” Jesse replied, and then next few moments were spent in the silent appreciation of the food -- which was, frankly, so good that it deserved appreciation stretched out to more than moments.

“When do you wish to leave for the meeting?” And there, oh so mildly phrased, was that sense of impending doom again. “The typhoon is still far enough away that the city authorities have not closed the majority of the capsule transports yet.”

“Nnnngh.” Jesse bought himself a few more minutes of not dealing with it yet by the virtue of a mouthful of broth-swollen udon, and then a few more with several perfectly cooked bits of beef, and by then Hanzo was regarding him with the sort of steady not-quite-a-glare look that demanded an answer. “An hour or so? Like you said, we can take the capsules.”

“As you wish,” Hanzo stacked his own dishes and rose. “Take your time. I will make the necessary preparations.”

Which was, Jesse reflected dolefully, slurping udon in what he hoped was a thoroughly reproachful manner at Hanzo’s retreating back, a definite indicator that he was going to be leaving the apartment in a suit whether he liked it or not. He was forced by native honesty, or at least native preference for not deluding himself, that he didn’t entirely hate it. Hanzo knew how to dress and carry himself to blend seamlessly into the assorted strata of the city’s society, from the highest of the high-rollers infesting every inch of every casino and swanky resort hotel to the lowest shopkeeper living and working a couple floors off the surface of the sea, spoke Cantonese like a native, and was capable of exuding an aura of _yes, I totally belong to be here_ no matter where ‘here’ happened to be that fully absorbed him into the man’s wake. The legacy, he supposed, of being brought up the heir apparent to a criminal empire that had, at one point, spanned a good chunk of the entire Greater Pacific Economic Cooperative Sphere and, to their certain knowledge, still retained an inviolable core of territory that no rival organization had succeeded at snatching away, despite the family’s current reduced circumstances. Also: the fact that the man seemed to know and be close personal friends with every single tailor between Kashgar and Nemuro, resulting in his current ownership of suits. Plural. When he had spent more or less his entire life avoiding ties and had intended to continue doing so indefinitely. Admittedly, having the advice of someone who knew what he was doing when it came to such things and an unyielding commitment to personal dignity and personal aesthetics at least eased most of the pain inherent in repeated fittings. And thus: suits.

Jesse gathered up and fridged the leftovers, put the dishes in the washer, and by the time he was done, Hanzo had emerged with his hair twisted up into its customary topknot, held together with ties of blue cloth and a couple little stick things he had personally witnessed being used as close-combat weapons in circumstances of extreme duress, dressed in flawlessly tailored sea-blue summer weight wool whose drape was absolutely not ruined by any of the other weapons he had stashed about his person, carrying its still-hangered evil twin, in a slightly darker shade of blue, shoulder holster for his weapon of choice inclusive in the design of the jacket, complete with waistcoat made at least in part of reclaimed kimono fabric. The look in his partner’s eyes indicated, with no words necessary, that he was absolutely not getting out of finally wearing the damned thing in public, to a meeting with Dr. Angela Ziegler, and Jesse rolled his eyes heavenward in despairing surrender. “Give it here before I change my mind about this whole damned thing.”

He allowed that it hung on him like it belonged there, which it damn well should have, given how much it cost, and Peacemaker slipped neatly into the place made for it, and even Hanzo couldn’t find much at all to fuss about when it came to making adjustments. “I need to get my -- “

“You are not wearing that hat with this suit,” Hanzo informed him, fingers still busy with a tie knot that was definitely more involved than a half-Windsor.

“My badge. I was doing to say ‘my badge.’” Jesse replied, deeply wounded -- he and that hat had been through some shit together.

Hanzo reached into the inner breast pocket of his own jacket and produced the item in question, anodized black-and-gold, and slipped it into the little notch on the inside of the jacket’s left lapel, where it could sit present but unobtrusive and mostly unseen. “Do you actually _require_ it for this meeting?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on the level of security they’re bringing to the party,” Jesse replied, striving for casually unconcerned and almost getting there. “They’re biometrically linked to the agents they’re issued to -- made it much, much harder back in the day to spoof a legit comms signal, or use the distress ping to call backup into a trap, that sort of thing. Absolute positive ID and all that.”

Hanzo finished the subtle violence he was inflicting on that defenseless tie, stepped back to survey his work, and nodded in satisfaction. “We have reservations for the Avenida capsule tube in a quarter of an hour. We should make a small amount of haste.”

“...Yeah.” It came out sounding substantially less _yes_ and more _kill me now_ than he liked, though Hanzo mercifully forbore to comment on it, locking the door behind him and handing him an umbrella, in the event that they had to spend more than three seconds in the rain.

Back in the day -- the day being the mid-thirties -- when it became blatantly obvious that no single government on Earth was going to actually bite the bullet and invest the required resources into actually doing something about the pressing need for atmospheric carbon sequestration and that, whether you believed in the science involved or not, the ice caps were going to melt and the sea was going to rise, a number of low-lying coastal cities were confronted with a rather serious issue -- namely, that high tide was about to go from “scenic photo op for the tourists” to “existential threat to our survival” in the relatively near future and that something needed to be done to ameliorate that threat licketysplit. Macau was, even then, one of the single richest places in the whole of the world, a city that had functioned for centuries as a Portuguese colonial possession and trade hub in south Asia before its independence, a major port of call for trans-Pacific commerce even after that, and a tourist draw for the entire region and beyond, its laws friendly to the sort of financial shenanigans that encouraged foreign investment in the local infrastructure and a comfortable level of graft and corruption that made a handful of corporate entities, and a somewhat larger handful of private individuals, obscenely wealthy. “The Las Vegas of the East,” it had been called even then, with an economy based heavily in freeport commercial activity and both local and foreign tourism, all of which required preservation from the increasingly obdurate hostility of the environment. Being largely governed by pragmatic technocrats with deep ties to the emergent technology firms of other nations, and desirous of preserving their city as both a port and a tourist draw, the governors of Macau had come up with a decidedly novel solution to their predicament -- instead of building walls to keep the sea out, they’d hoisted the entire city off its foundations in the Pearl River Delta, five hundred feet off its foundations, hotels, casinos, unique historical remnants and all, and now it hung suspended over the ocean on platforms supported by the same antigrav technology that powered hypertrains, backstopped by enormous stanchion blocks the height of a fifty story building and as big around as a city block, unmovable by even the highest tide or the fiercest typhoon wind, linked together by transportation capsule tubes recently entirely refurbished by the Vishkar Corporation. The upper city remained the playground of the rich and tasteless and the principal residence of the powerful; the stanchion blocks did quadruple duty as the sea-level entry point of call for ocean-going commerce, residential zones for the people who actually did most of the work that kept the city going, a floating black market for every form of contraband known to man, and as emergency typhoon shelters, buried deep inside the blocks’ mass, where neither wind nor rain could reach.

Describing your city as the Las Vegas of Anywhere was pretty much the best way in the world to make Hanzo Shimada hate it unreservedly, associating -- correctly -- the entire idea of Las Vegas with unregenerate tackiness elevated to a culturally significant art form previously unwitnessed in human society as he did. In Jesse’s experience, Macau’s casino district, a whole platform of its own, wasn’t actually anywhere near as tasteless as Vegas even in the places where it was actively trying to be by virtue of being part of a _literally floating city_ , which had a certain cachet all its own. (The fact that the city’s gambling rackets were mostly under the control of local talent and that every single attempt by the _ninkyo dantai_ to muscle in on that action had been repulsed with extreme prejudice had in no way shaped Hanzo’s opinion, he was absolutely sure.) Neither was Hanzo the sort to actually live inside a glorified nanocarbon-reinforced cement shoebox unless forced to by outrageous fortune, and so they resided up top on the Zhuhai plate, far out from the city center, in the residential block that had, at one point, been an actual separate city gobbled up by Macau’s inexorable sprawl and now functioned as housing for mid-level financial services employees, junior government officials, and corporate functionaries of all sorts. Also: criminals of a whitish collar type affluent, and deeply enough involved in the city’s strictly unacknowledged, broadly tolerated money laundering shadow economy to be almost respectable, one of whom they had been surveilling for weeks when the recall signal had abruptly, unexpectedly complicated their present situation, followed shortly by direct communication from one Dr. Angela Ziegler, which had complicated it still further and, moreover, led to their present position, inside a transportation capsule zipping across the gap between plates on rails of solid light in the general direction of the Avenida plate and the Grand Emperor Hotel.

Five years. Five years and change if he wanted to be really specific about it. Five years, plus change, and he had never really expected to hear that call again, not ever, and yet here they were. Most of it spent hopping jurisdictions -- Macau was personally attractive for being a place where he wasn’t actively wanted by the local authorities, not even for jaywalking or misplacing a cigar butt, and those local authorities’ general indifference to international most-wanted listings so long as their subjects weren’t stirring anything in the local pot. And he had rather stringent guidelines when it came to both stirring shit and stopping the stirring thereof, which had thus far kept him from contemplating the inside of any number of prisons the world over, and the activities of their current target had not yet yielded enough actionable intelligence to cross the ‘and now we really have to do something’ threshold. Five years and a goddamned _recall code_ , of all things, because where, exactly, could anybody actually recall _to_? What was left of Watchpoint Geneva had been demolished as a public hazard almost as soon as the formal investigation closed and a tasteful memorial park dedicated to the victims of the explosion plunked down on top of the filled-in foundation, and the rest of the Watchpoints were in assorted stages of decommission. (The signal had originated at Watchpoint Gibraltar, which he knew had been singled out and set aside as the only ‘point not subject to decommission no matter which territorial government or multinational corporate entity wanted to get their hands on the stuff inside -- set aside, point in fact, as a designated permanent residence for former Overwatch agents whose “unique conditions” made it impossible to reintegrate, or integrate at all, into “normal” society. Winston was a goddamned super-intelligent ape from a rebel lunar colony, after all, it wasn’t like deporting him wouldn’t cost a lot more than just keeping him in supplies. Lena could become permanently unstuck in time if her chronal accelerator wasn’t regularly maintained. And Genji -- well, Genji had more machine bits than anything else, _life support armor_ if you really wanted to describe it accurately, all of which regularly required repair, maintenance, and upgrades and probably would have even if he didn’t spend most of his spare time kicking over hornet’s nests. Which he did. _Frequently_. He’d been tempted, more than once, during particularly bad stretches, to knock on that door and ask for shelter that he knew wouldn’t be denied -- but that would have brought whatever trouble was nipping at his ass back home and the possibility of wrecking the only protection some of the others had...well, that was not a risk he was willing to take.) He’d responded to the ping, signalling his location to the Gibraltar communications array, but had left his comms turned off and stayed where he was -- and then, as they were sometimes wont to do, the metaphorical mountain had come to him. Or, rather, Dr. Angela Ziegler, particularly known to former agents of Overwatch as Mercy, had tracked down his actual semi-public comm address and messaged him to let him know she was going to be in Macau for a conference and just barely _asking_ to see him while she was there. Needed to talk about something, _urgently_. He’d looked up the conference in question and the talk she was supposed to give (“Toward A Unified Approach In the Use of Biotic Field Technology In the Suppression and Containment of Tropical and Semitropical Epidemic-Scale Disease Outbreaks,” which was two hundred percent in her bailiwick and likely as exactly as humanity-serving and boring as it sounded) and signaled his willingness to meet; she’d responded with place and time and cordially invited him to bring a “guest,” which suggested she knew enough about Hanzo to realize there was no way in Hell he’d agree to being left behind and possibly had the story of how they’d ended up working together, perchance from Genji Shimada’s own mouth. (It was, in fact, _all Genji’s fault_ though he’d decided to roll with it once all was said and done. And so had Hanzo. And, as the months had stretched on and things had come together the way they did, Jesse had begun to strongly suspect that not only was it all Genji’s fault but that the little bastard had done it _deliberately_ because Hanzo needed someone to lead almost as much as Jesse needed someone to follow and putting them together had the additional salutary effect of reducing the work of keeping track of both of them by half. Genji was obviously too smart for anyone’s good.) And now here they were pulling up in front of the hotel and he was not even slightly ready for this, not even the tiniest little bit.

“Breathe,” Hanzo murmured against his ear, his hand a comforting warm weight in the small of his back as they crossed the hotel lobby, radiating a level of no, I do not require your assistance at this time, peasants that kept the uniformed employees at a respectful distance. “Peace in, stress out.”

Jesse did so and his insides moderated their skittering around accordingly. “Thanks. I needed that.”

“You cannot possibly be afraid of this woman -- she is a _physician_.” Hanzo flicked a look out of the corner of his eyes.

“And that, my friend, is where you’re wrong -- there is no fear like the fear of dealing with Doc Ziegler when she thinks you haven’t been listening to her advice.” Jesse attempted to adjust his tie, found it unadjustable due to the complexity of the knot, and settled for leaning back against the elevator wall. “Or, God help you, acting in _direct opposition_ to her advice. Or doing something that she thinks requires her personal intervention.”

“ _Have_ you?” Hanzo was not even attempting to conceal his amusement, damn his pretty eyes. “Followed her advice?”

“When I _had_ to, yes. The point is, I suspect this is some kind of well-meaning intervention call where she’s going to tell me how worried everyone is about me and how I should come back with her to wherever she’s going and then I will have to explain to her, in detail, both how and why that’s impossible and _I will never know another moment’s peace until she has my life straightened out to her satisfaction_.” He let his head fall back against the wall with a resounding thud. “Dammit, I need a drink already.”

“Is it completely beyond the bounds of possibility that she could do so?” Hanzo asked, quietly, and the question hung unanswered between them for the rest of the ride up to the penthouse level suites, where the conference presenters were being housed on the city’s dime, Doc Ziegler inclusive.

Hers was the west corner suite and Jesse, frankly, had no idea if she could fix his life, for values of fix that meant “put right everything that went horribly, magnificently wrong when Overwatch was disbanded and the blanket pardon issued to members of Blackwatch in possession of significant criminal history was rescinded as one of the more explicitly vengeful provisions of the Petras Act.” He rather doubted it, not the least because Doc Ziegler was not a politician and that was the sort of thing that would require a not inconsiderable quantity of finesse in the political arena -- or else an outstanding lack of finesse, depending -- and a level of pull no one left standing in the wake of Overwatch seemed to possess. And that was only the _could_ half of that particular equation, leaving entirely alone any consideration of _should_.

The Grand Emperor had some of the best security in the city -- which was to say, the kind that was fundamentally invisible until it reared out of nowhere to bite any breakers of the peace firmly on the ass. Doc Ziegler’s door was one of those elaborately carved and embellished things meant to resemble a fantasy novel conception of the inner portals of someone’s tastefully decorated concubine quarters; it probably could have survived an explosion. A _thermite_ explosion. The comm panel was artfully concealed in the polished hardwood wainscoting and he punched in the code she’d given him when they confirmed their meeting time to let her know he was there, Hanzo standing perfectly, watchfully at ease at his back. Not entirely to his surprise, the reply came through the commlink embedded in his badge. “Identify yourself.”

“Really, Doc? Really?” He thought he heard someone bark out a laugh on the other end of the connection. “Fine. Agent Jesse McCree, Blackwatch callsign Deadeye, reporting for something. Hopefully the something will involve whiskey.” He paused. “And guest.”

The door lock chimed and the door itself slid open, recessing into the wall smooth as silk and then back again once they passed the security scanners embedded in the frame and then he was looking at Angela Ziegler for the first time in a long damned time. She looked as luminously magnificent as ever she had in the past and he abruptly wished he’d shaved, prior history of scruffy or not. “Well, damn, Doc -- the years have been good to you, haven’t they?”

“Agent McCree,” The doctor replied, in tones of severe repression, but it made her smile and it made her blush, which was part of the point -- he always found it easier to deal with her when she was displaying obvious signs of tangible humanity. “You...My goodness. You do clean up well.”

Hanzo made a noise that could not be described as anything other than pure and perfect amusement. The _asshole_. “Yeah, well, don’t get used to it -- it’s situationally appropriate camouflage.” He automatically quartered and swept the room -- obviously the main social space of the suite, Angie kitted out to the nines in white and charcoal gray silk, furniture he would have feared to sit in were he dressed in any of his ordinary clothes, communications center including what had to be her own personal computer setup, entertainment options including those of an alcoholic nature, what would have been a panoramic view of the city by night from enormous floor to ceiling windows, currently shuttered and curtained. “Hanzo Shimada, this is the inimitable Dr. Angela Ziegler, certified genius in the field of saving other people’s asses. Angie, this is Hanzo, Genji’s big brother. But I’m guessing you knew that already.”

“I did.” Angela bowed, a perfectly calibrated gesture of greeting suitable to both his dignity and hers, which he returned without a trace of irony. “Your brother has told me a great deal about you.”

Hanzo smiled wryly. “Nothing terrible, I trust.”

“Please come in, both of you…” Angela led the way, resolutely ignoring the bait, and gestured toward the not-so-little entertainment area with its selection of intimidating furniture and its top of the line holovid tank. “We have much to discuss.” She lit up her computer’s monitor and the tank sprang to life more or less simultaneously as she worked. 

The images were blurry, the picture quality crap to begin with and the entire scene dark except for the intermittent glow of emergency backup lights that weren’t receiving anywhere near full power, the flash of pulse-munition fire. An enormous blur in the lower right corner in spit-shined white-and-gold argued in favor of Winston, all armored up, but he wasn’t the focus. That honor belonged to the vaguely human-shaped cloud of darkness taking up most of the zoomed-in frame. It didn’t seem to have actual legs but it sure as Hell had arms, and hands with a weapon in each, broad shoulders and a deep hood that didn’t quite fully overshadow a pale, stylized faceplate that, as Angie fiddled with the display settings, came more sharply into focus. Jesse caught his breath and, behind him, he heard Hanzo do the same.

“My apologies for the quality of the image,” When she was vexed about something, Angie’s accent tended to come out a bit more -- she sounded, at the moment, like an extremely irritated Swiss milkmaid who was also secretly an angel. “We lifted this from the security camera feeds that were still functioning in Watchpoint Gibraltar -- it is, by far, the clearest and still not very. Do you know who this is?”

Jesse shot a glance over his shoulder, took a moment to enjoy the look on Hanzo’s face, and drawled, “‘Know’ is a mighty strong word there, Doc. ‘Heard tell of’ is more accurate. So is ‘just barely missed meeting in a not-good way.’ But, yeah, we know. Calls himself Reaper, because of course he does. Do I even wanna know why that’s important?”

Angie minimized the pic itself and pulled up a data file, a scrolling precis of greatest hits, some confirmed, some presumed, the most recent of which, Jesse noted, was the uninvited call paid on Watchpoint Gibraltar. “His objective at the Watchpoint was to seize the files containing the known and presumed locations and identities of all former Overwatch and Blackwatch agents still living, and to corrupt and destroy Athena by means of viral infiltration.”

Athena was Gibraltar’s resident, more-or-less entirely tame artificial intelligence, a god program that had, unlike most of her siblings, managed not to go axe crazy when the opportunity presented itself and assisted in putting the rest of her kind down. The idea of someone trying to hack and destabilize her systems by force struck him as residing somewhere high on the extraordinarily bad by any metric list of plans that should be reconsidered, repeatedly, before being put into action. “I’m guessing that didn’t work.”

Angie was silent for a decidedly unnerving length of time. “We...are not entirely certain.”

“....Pardon?” 

“We are not entirely certain,” She repeated and it made no more sense than it did the first time. “Winston halted the download and Athena’s internal defenses managed to sequester the viral intrusion. Reaper...disappeared. Winston thought, at the time, that it was not entirely impossible that he was discorporated at the cellular level by an experimental weapon he happened to have on hand.” Dryly. “Immediately afterwards, Winston sent the recall transmission in an effort to ping as many former agents as possible.”

“Yeah, I got that.” Jesse drifted closer and took control of the holovid itself, scrolling back up the file, pulling the image back to front and center.

“It was an impulsive decision,” Angie continued and punched up another sequence of files that she sent scrolling across the tank, “but it may also have been a wise one. The commlink pingbacks allowed us to...answer a few questions. Issue a global threat assessment and warning to almost all who responded. Reaper may have only been taunting Winston with the use he intended to make of the information he was attempting to steal -- but, given the nature of his known prior activities, that is not a risk we were inclined to take.”

“‘We’?” Jesse asked, inclining a questioning brow.

“We were also finally able to correlate the transponder ping data with the personnel files of the Overwatch and Blackwatch agents who were in active service at the time of the final dissolution of the organization.” The tank filled floor to ceiling with faces, some he knew well, some only in passing, some he had to look away from before his own face betrayed him. “You are correct that time has been kind to me, Agent McCree -- it has been less so to many others. Illness. Accident. Mischance. Even instances of random violence, though not as many as I would have thought given our...avocation. A statistically reasonable curve of distribution between life and death -- except in one respect.” She pulled out a sequence of two dozen files, all stamped with Blackwatch’s distinct subgroup insignia, all but three surrounded in the black bands that denoted their passage into a different watch. “Commander Reyes and three other members of Blackwatch were killed in the explosion that destroyed Watchpoint Geneva. Since then…” She gestured expressively. “Since then, the former agents of Blackwatch have suffered a rate of mortality...significantly higher than any other former component of Overwatch. Athena is still compiling specific case histories but we do not, at this point, think this is a tragic confluence of chance and circumstance.”

_Impending doom_ came roaring back with a vengeance and at some incredibly great intellectual distance he heard Hanzo ask, “Doctor, are you saying that there are only three Blackwatch agents…?”

“No,” Angela replied, coolly level. “I am saying that we have, at this time, been unable to make positive contact via comms or passive transponder pingback with two of those three -- and the one we have achieved contact with is standing in this room with me.” Her tone softened ever so slightly. “Agent McCree, you may be the only surviving former Blackwatch operative, and we do not believe the deaths of your former colleagues to be the product of pure mischance or primarily natural causes. I am here, at least in part, to ask you to come with us, for your own protection.”

Jesse crossed to the small but exceedingly well-supplied wet bar, poured himself two fingers of something at least fifteen years old, and downed it in a single swallow. Then he repeated the process twice more before he felt himself adequately anaesthetized. “Someone is targeting Blackwatch operatives. Wait. Correction -- _has been_ targeting Blackwatch operatives and _hitting them_ at a rate of success that blows any chance it’s _not_ a deliberate hit straight to Hell, is that what I’m hearing?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” Angela leaned back against the desk and regarded him levelly. “And we believe your life is in danger, as a result, and ask that you come with us.”

“‘Us’?” Jesse asked, again, and poured number four. “What, exactly, constitutes _us_ at this point, Doc?”

“I did not come here alone,” She replied, tersely. “I -- “

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.” He sipped this time, because it was good enough to deserve slightly more respectful treatment, even if he had bulls-eyes pinned front, back, and on his forehead. “Overwatch is _gone_ , Doc. The fact that we’re standing here having this conversation is probably illegal enough for some asshole with a hard-on for pushing the Petras Act as hard as possible to put you in prison for the rest of your natural life. Hell, they’re braiding the noose they want to put around me half from the actions I was sanctioned to take _by_ Blackwatch.” He shook his head. “You can’t possibly -- “

“We are reassembling the team.” And she offered a hand, because of course she did. “Please, Jesse. You are in danger, and not only from the forces of law enforcement. Your presence cannot endanger us more than we have already chosen to endanger ourselves.”

“I would _seriously_ beg to differ on that point, Doc.” Jesse replied, and actively contemplated a fifth. “I’m -- “

The door to the suite’s private quarters hissed open with a whisper of displaced air, and a ghost walked through it. “You’re still as stubborn as you were when you were just a gun-running street rat in Santa Fe, you know that, kid?”

The glass made a _disturbingly_ musical sound as it hit the floor and shattered. Hanzo had a knife in each hand before the echoes finished bouncing off the walls and stepped fully between them, flicked a glance over his shoulder but held his ground, waiting. Jesse took a deep breath and let it out, wordless, then another and drifted forward, rested two fingers on the back of Hanzo’s hand and he relaxed, fractionally, but kept his weapons out.

The corner of the ghost’s mouth twitched back, not far enough to be anything resembling a real smile and nowhere near his eyes in any case. “Frankly, I didn’t understand what Reyes saw in you just then but now…? The fact that you’re standing here and he’s not might be the best possible vindication of his judgment.”

Jesse drifted forward a few more steps, not entirely sure if the sensation lightening his head was unadulterated shock or almost four glasses of exceptionally good whiskey, some combination of the two, or something else entirely. The other corner of the ghost’s mouth slid back a notch and it definitely was an expression, and it allowed Jesse to identify the exact composition of what was going on in his head.

“You _asshole_.” 

And Jesse McCree punched former Overwatch Commander Jack Morrison in his no-longer-perfect face.


	3. Pretty Sure I Deserved That

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which six minutes that changed the world are discussed.

“ _Jesse!_ ” It was actually mildly satisfying to startle Doc Ziegler so badly she just flat out yelped his given name.

Substantially more gratifying? The way Jack _Unregenerate Asshole_ Morrison’s nose compacted under his knuckles, the sensation that traveled all the way up his arm to send ripples of utter contentment across the calm, still lake of whiskey-enabled fury that was his mind, and the complex assortment of noises the old man’s body made as it hit the floor. Hanzo had his left elbow and right wrist in hand before the cold satisfaction of watching the old man bleed had the chance to even begin settling -- a warning, not a real attempt at physical restraint, that would have been a good deal less friendly and substantially more uncomfortable. His partner _also_ had some fairly sincere and deeply held feelings when it came to respecting one’s elders, to which the senior members of his family, among others, continued to owe their lives.

“That was _completely_ unnecessary,” Doc Ziegler snapped and knelt, cracking open the little medical kit she carried with her at all times, pulling on a pair of nitrile gloves.

Morrison propped himself up on his elbows and blinked a few times, accepted the sterile saline wipe Angela handed him to mop up the blood. “I suppose I should be grateful you didn’t go for the left hook.” 

Hanzo’s grip on his left elbow hardened up a fraction, even as his metal fingers curled into his metal palm, not entirely of his conscious volition. “We can try it, if you want.”

“ _That is enough_.” Doc Ziegler, when she wanted to, could genuinely bring the sit-down-shut-the-fuck-up and she was deploying with singular intensity of focus just now; it was probably the whiskey, but Jesse wasn’t quite feeling it.

“No, I don’t think it is. Would you two like to explain, using small words and diagrams, how _he_ came to be _not dead?_ ” Hanzo relinquished his grip long enough to allow a gesture that was two-thirds obscene. “‘Cause between y’all and me I seem to recall a funeral, twenty-one guns, flags at half-staff, all that happy horseshit.”

“Long story.” The old man -- _Jack Back From the Goddamned Dead Morrison_ , and Jesse had the rather distinct feeling he was _never_ going to let that go, not ever -- got to his feet, made a minor adjustment to his all-but-healed nose, and exchanged a speaking look with Doc Ziegler.

“Conference runs for another two days, so I assume we’ve got time.” He flicked a look at Doc Ziegler, still steaming quietly. “You _knew_ about this?”

Another speaking glance and a brief but tense silence. “I helped facilitate it,” She admitted, and turned to stash her med kit back away.

“God _damn_ it, you two.” He reached up and massaged his eyes, moderately appalled to discover how damp they were trying to become as he did it. “And at _no point_ in the last five years, _neither_ of you though it might be a good idea to let the rest of us know it wasn’t true?”

“No,” Jack _Obviously_ Itching For Another Sharp Blow to the Face Morrison replied. “And if you’d apply a fraction of the brain I know you’ve got, you’d realize why. _Think_.”

Jesse had, in fact, been assiduously avoiding _thinking about it_ almost as long as he’d been running from the fallout _surrounding_ it -- waking up one morning to discover oneself ardently wanted by the law enforcement apparatus of half the planet, tagged with a completely ludicrous bounty and the official indifference of the aforementioned authorities with regard to the status of one’s continued existence at the point of collection, that had a rather profound capacity to focus one’s attention on the here-and-now. He’d seen the news reports, of course -- there was no way not to see them -- and he could call that first holovid news report back to mind with perfect clarity, even now, as though it were engraved on the insides of his eyelids. He’d been stationed at Geneva for the eight months prior and, for a moment, he hadn’t even recognized it, his eyes and his mind had both actively refused to recognize it, refused to admit that the information streamers or the words coming out of the newsreader’s mouth were even a language he could comprehend. First reports of small arms fire at the Overwatch headquarters complex at 0117 hours local time -- followed, four minutes later, by a sequence of small explosions, and, seven minutes after that, by a substantially larger explosion, as the magnetic containment bubble around the facility’s power plant failed and took a third of Watchpoint Geneva and everything living or otherwise inside the initial blast radius with it. The shockwave itself set off more than a dozen subsidiary explosions -- ammunition stockpiles, energy experiments in progress, anything that could theoretically go boom if poked hard enough -- and by 0203 it was all over but the screaming. He had checked out of the entirely nondescript little hostel he’d been staying at in Santa Fe and proceeded to break the living Hell out of the rental contract on his car by hauling ass to his previously designated secondary fallback point, an equally nondescript hunting shack in Ass-End-of-Nowhere, Alberta, where he spent the next seventy-two hours attempting, with gradually rising levels of panic, to raise the one person he _really_ wanted to speak to, on a commlink frequency so restricted only six people on Earth had access to it. The radio on the ride north had been full of the sort of useless chatter that passed for news in the immediate aftermath of a major disaster, not one of word of which he considered credible, which he still, at some level did not consider credible even after the investigation (“the single largest forensic crime scene investigation in the last sixty years and possibly the largest in history”) that had confirmed the broad outline. A _terrorist attack._ A goddamned _terrorist attack_ of such outstanding surgical precision it had penetrated a facility whose security procedures and countermeasures, both internal and external, were designed by a man who had lived his entire existence by the belief that any place you returned to habitually could be a place where you got careless and, shortly thereafter, dead. A goddamned _impossibly surgically precise terrorist attack_ that had not only reached a point of internal vulnerability -- a point hardened against external attack with the intent that it could have, should have survived a plasma lance hit from a rogue orbital defense satellite -- it had destabilized it to the point of absolute destruction. A _goddamned terrorist attack_ that had collected a dozen Overwatch operatives on station at Watchpoint Geneva and almost two hundred civilian support specialists who lived and worked at the base, most of whom had, almost mercifully, died in their sleep, and two of the three most senior operational commanders on site at the time. Seventy-two hours without a response on secure comms had forced on him a certain level of painful reality though, clearly, the reports of Jack _Not So Much, Surprise!_ Morrison’s death were heavily exaggerated. 

“It was an inside job,” Finally saying it out loud, astonishingly, did not make the cold and painful suspicion he’d nursed for five years plus change hurt any less -- neither did the lack of surprise that greeted it. “No external hit could have cracked Geneva that smooth or that fast, no fucking way.”

“In one,” Morrison murmured, his own voice a little tighter, a little rougher than it had been a moment before. “Yes, that’s the supposition we’ve been operating under.”

“You and Doc Ziegler here. Nobody else?” He flicked a look at her still-turned back.

“Not until now, no.” Morrison reached out and laid a hand on Doc Ziegler’s shoulder. “Let it go, Mercy. I’m pretty sure I deserved that.”  
“You would.” She didn’t turn around and went instead to her computer, dismissing one set of files and pulling up another and, not for the first time, Jesse was reminded why her callsign was sometimes painfully ironic. Still images of the night itself, lifted from Geneva’s internal security monitor feeds: a handful, no more than that, in full tactical gear, full-visor-and-faceplate inclusive, all of it coated in the fractal mesh designed to significantly frustrate if not entirely defeat remote visual observation, making their way through what he knew to be the lower levels of the Watchpoint. “The forensic team responsible for processing the wreckage found traces of their remains -- _microscopic_ traces of their remains -- in the blast crater the explosion excavated beneath headquarters. They dropped the reactor’s blast shields, sealed the control center, and detonated the explosives they used to destabilize the core with themselves still inside. Whatever countermeasures they used to isolate the control center from the rest of the headquarters network actively resisted any attempt to override them. The security network registered three attempts to do so before the explosion -- once by Commander Morrison, and twice by Commander Reyes.” Another set of images scrolled across the holotank and Hanzo’s hand slid down his arm, external sensors registering the motion and interpreting it inside his brain as touch-without-touch, came to rest against his palm. “I found Commander Reyes deep inside the primary collapse zone, just beyond ground zero for the explosion -- in all likelihood, had he been any closer to the hypocenter, there would have been nothing left to find. He was…” She paused, took a deep, somewhat unsteady breath, and continued. “His injuries were extensive -- unsurvivable, even with the SEP’s metabolic enhancements, though he was still...alive...when I located him. I directed my recovery team to render him palliative care and they recorded his time of death at 0434 hours.” Jesse closed his eyes and breathed peace for all he was worth, his hand closed convulsively around Hanzo’s own. “I found Commander Morrison in the primary collapse zone, as well, though significantly farther from the hypocenter of the blast. In addition to the sort of injuries one would expect in such circumstances, he had been shot twice in the back of the head at close range.”

“No one ever accused me of not having a thick skull,” Morrison replied dryly to the chorus of shocked looks shot in his direction. “Wasn’t the first time it saved my life, probably won’t be the last.”

“It was not your thick skull that saved you,” Doc Ziegler replied in a tone that clearly implied _you rock-chewing idiot_. “Security made initial contact with the intruders just outside the control room -- the only such contact with the Watchpoint’s internal active security -- and a very brief firefight ensued, the security breach alarms sounded, the intruders isolated themselves, and at 0122 hours, Commander Morrison attempted to initiate an override of the lockout. At 0128 hours, the reactor core destabilized and detonated, destroying Watchpoint Geneva. In the six minutes between those events, someone attempted to assassinate Commander Morrison. As closely as we can determine, no visual record of those events survived either the explosion or the electromagnetic pulse released when the high energy research laboratory collapsed.”

“Arguing for at least two separate teams, one to hit the reactor and the other to hit Morrison.” Jesse unbent long enough to look the man in the eye. “Do you…?”

“Remember anything?” A humorless smile. “I believe the term is ‘massive penetrative head trauma.’”

“When did Reyes attempt to override the lockout?” He kept his back firmly on the holotank, well aware that he would be seeing a great many things he had only guessed about prior in his nightmares for at least the foreseeable future and quite possibly forever. 

“Once at 0124 and, again, at 0127, fifteen seconds before the explosion.” Doc Ziegler supplied the information.

“You weren’t together?”

The question hung, unanswered, for an uncomfortably long time.

“If we were,” Morrison finally replied, supremely cool and even, “it’s another thing two bullets and at least a few chunks of flying shrapnel decided that I really don’t need to know.”

“Commander Morrison’s own injuries were severe enough that his expectation of survival was low, at best.” It was with infinite gratitude that he welcomed Doc Ziegler’s readily apparent desire not to go further down that rabbit hole just yet. “I attended him personally and -- “

“Faked my death with the same thorough competence with which she does everything else.” Dryly and utterly affectionate. “Smuggled me out of Europe and back to the States, kept me out of sight until I could...function properly again. Took longer than it should have, too.”  
“That you recovered at all is a testament to the quality of your metabolic enhancements.” Absolutely freighted with asperity. “And possibly the fact that you are too stubborn to die.”

“I’ll lay money on that last one, Doc,” Jesse interjected, “But now I gotta ask -- how does this change anything? You’re alive and that’s great and all, for what it is, but we’re in exactly the same place we were before. Everything we worked for got blown to Hell, literally, when we had _actual support_ from the UN and at least the lip-service of most of the member nations. Now? This meeting alone could still see the whole lot of us spending our golden years enjoying the accommodations at Stammheim. Yeah, someone might be gunning for me in specific. This is not actually a _new development._ ” He swallowed with just the slightest difficulty. “And just about everybody who died five years ago is still dead -- and nothing y’all just told me will get us one damn step closer to bringing whoever did it to justice.” The silence went _well_ past uncomfortable. “Didn’t think so. Listen, Doc, it’s good to see you -- sincerely, it is. And I’m almost sorry I hit you, old man. Give me a few more hours and another couple glasses of whiskey and I will likely be both _extremely sorry_ and sickeningly maudlin about it, so I suggest we skip that and just go straight for the handshake and the parting as friends part of the evening’s festivities.”

“Jesse -- “ Doc Ziegler began, deeply unhappy and he had to stop her right there before he allowed it lead him somewhere deeply foolish.

“Now, darlin’, don’t do that. You’ll make me cry and where will that get us?” He tugged her into a hug, which she accepted, and out of the corner of his eye he caught Hanzo -- looking entirely too grave and thoughtful by half -- exchanging looks with Morrison and, oh, that wasn’t going to do, either. “You ready, ‘Zo?”

Hanzo, without missing a single solitary beat, transferred that grave and thoughtful look fully onto him and didn’t even complain about the nickname which generally could be construed as an invitation to rhetorical _and_ actual violence when used in public. Instead, his partner offered Morrison a bow, and a second to Doc Ziegler, the old man didn’t quite break the fingers he’d used to add another degree of not-straight to his nose, and then they _left,_ the door sliding shut at his back doing not one damn thing to release the tension singing along every nerve. The lobby was all-but abandoned, the hour later than he thought and the raining picking up again, turning the street into a dark, reflection-smeared river; he rested his forehead on the plate glass and watched it flow by, trying not to blink or close his eyes more than he had to, knowing what he’d see if he did. Their return capsule pulled up in a few minutes and in a few more they were on their way back to their current definition of home, lightning leaping from cloud to cloud in the storm piling up on the city’s unnatural horizon. 

“Typhoon’s got to be getting close,” Jesse observed, glad to have something _practical_ to focus on, if only for a moment. “We should probably get ready to hunker down.”

“Mm.” It was, technically, agreement -- a minimalist gesture and, beneath it, he could feel the weight of Hanzo’s levelly assessing look, didn’t quite dare to meet it.

Hanzo had also left a light on in the living room for which he was strangely, pathetically grateful, part of him finding walking face-first into unrelieved darkness on the far edge of things he could deal with just now. “It’s too goddamn late to go and watch for whatever Ts’ong’s been waiting on -- not even that oleaginous little prick’ll be oozing around on a night like this.” He shrugged out of his now-damp coat, hung it up, began attempting to undo the very possibly non-euclidian tie-knot Hanzo had inflicted on him. “Which makes this entire night a colossal waste of -- “

And that was as far as Hanzo let him get. Four inches of height and a solid fifty pounds he had on the man and there had not been one single instant during the course of their association, drunk or stone cold sober, in which Hanzo Shimada had not been able to manhandle him at whim. Frankly, he blamed the entire House of Shimada for that state of affairs.

He hit the wall just to the left of the bedroom door with force precisely judged to knock most, but not all, of the air out of him, taking most of a possible struggle with it, and ring his skull hard enough that for a moment he saw literal stars. The servos in his left arm whined a little protest as Hanzo hit the emergency disconnection sequence and the whole thing let go at the elbow, hitting the floor with a resounding metallic thud. “Hanzo -- “

His head bounced off the wall again and he forgot what he was about to say. Hanzo’s mouth closed over his own, Hanzo’s teeth sank into his lip, gently, so gently compared to everything else thus far, Hanzo’s entirely other than gentle hands pulled him sideways through the door and pushed him down on their bed. He took his hair down and dispensed with the tie by slicing through it alongside the knot in a single fluid motion, razor-edged steel pressing the lightest of kisses to the curve of his throat and he finally, finally permitted a bit of assistance, even though there was only one hand now to give and entirely too many buttons to bother with and now both knives were out and that poor tailor was going to murder them in their sleep for this. Probably the second-best way he could hope to die.

Hanzo kissed him breathless, pinned him to the bed by the expedient of sitting astride his hips and simply refusing to be dislodged, caught his free arm and tied it above his head to the frame with the sad remains of the tie and his hair scarf. It was probably the same damned knot, because it surely did not have the slightest trace of give to it. Hanzo bit down hard on meat of his shoulder as he twisted his arm in a not-quite struggle, hard enough to break skin and draw blood and that sensation, followed by the rough lap of his lover’s tongue, sent a jolt through him that traveled the length of his spine, lodged in the back of his skull and sat there, strobing like a pulse round, lightening the insides of his head and driving out anything but this, the awareness of this, flesh and blood and hungry, panting breath. Hanzo’s teeth scraped hard and without any particular mercy over his nipples, pressed a line of hot and messy kisses down the ridged muscle of his belly, suckled hard enough at the flesh on the inside of his thighs that he could feel the marks rising. Hanzo’s fingers were inside him, brief and desultory, and then it was all he could do to hold on, not even one-handed, as his lover took him, hard and fast, finding his rhythm and his angle almost immediately, a hot stretching burn that ended in an electric burst of pleasure. No way either of them was going to last long against this and so he abandoned himself to it, arched into each thrust, every nerve singing already, and by the time they reached the edge he was more than ready to go over it.

Jesse came back to himself slowly, swimming up from the warm, dark depth where there was only this, them together in a bed that smelled of sweat and sex and the only blood drawn was done so for the joy of it. He woke with his head pillowed on Hanzo’s arm, his lover’s body a line of warmth and solidity against his back, slow, even breaths on the back of his neck, a hand knotted in the curls of his chest hair. He lay there for a long time afterward, luxuriating in the sensation, Hanzo pressing soft kisses to the line of his shoulder.

“Thank you for that,” Jesse murmured, as soon as he remembered how to pronounce vowels.

“Mm.” Hanzo’s fingers spread, stroked slowly over his heart. “You needed this.”

“Yeah,” He agreed, and nestled his face deeper into the crook of Hanzo’s arm. “I did.”

Hanzo was silent for a space thereafter but not asleep, his free hand stroking slowly, collarbones to navel, and Jesse drifted, exhausted, wrung out, fucked deliciously limp, willing that sensation to soothe him back down and keep away anything that might disturb their collective sleep.

“You are angry,” Hanzo finally murmured, mouth against his ear, “not because Commander Morrison is alive, and not because Doctor Ziegler kept it from you, but because the man you loved and honored as your mentor, your teacher is not -- and that is not their fault, nor is it yours.”

Jesse laughed, huskily, and felt tears prickling at the inside of his eyelids. “Debatable.”

“Perhaps.” A line of kisses against the shell of his ear. “But I cannot think he would have wished for you to die with him.” That wandering hand curled into a fist over his heart. “Nor do I think he would smile gladly at you throwing your life away with no purpose.”

“Hanzo -- “

“No. Hear me.” He pressed the last of the space from between their bodies. “You know what this means as well as I. You may be the moving target that has thus far proven impossible to hit but now you are also the _last._ You may have _always_ been the last. I think,” with terrible calm deliberation, “that we should go with them when they leave.”

It took him a long time to remember how to pronounce vowels again. “‘We’?”

“ _We._ ”


	4. Plan Your Heroics Accordingly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our heroes attempt to perform some honest work, only to be thwarted in the most unpleasant way possible.

Jesse woke suddenly and completely, and for the life of him could not imagine why. It was cool -- blessedly cool after the miserable wet heat of the last few weeks, air so thick it was like breathing water and not even sweating helped because nothing ever evaporated, just soaked in until your clothes were as damp as your skin. It was dark -- not the thick, almost physically palpable dark under the dripping canopy of the _Selva Amazonica_ , where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face without a set of night vision goggles and a satellite telemetry feed, but rather the dark of a trim little private cubicle in the infirmary of some Watchpoint somewhere, after all but the most immovable visitors were kicked out and the lights lowered to allow the patients some semblance of rest. Which would, all things considered, make the most sense since he was in precisely such a cubicle, supine upon one of those abnormally comfortable floating hospital beds with a nasal cannula feeding all that wonderfully cool, dry air directly into his lungs and a million or two tubes and wires coming into or going out of or otherwise stuck to his body, his body which was remarkably and absolutely pain-free from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes. His mouth was as dry as week old roadkill left to bake on the Albuquerque roadside in July -- he swore he could hear the surface of his tongue cracking as he tried to swallow, tried to work up enough moisture to speak.

As it happened, he didn’t have to. A source of palely flickering light off to the left, outside of his immediate field of vision, clicked off, the clatter of a workpad being set aside. “Thirsty?”

He knew that voice and it sent a wave of relief through him stronger than it had any right to be. _Fuck yes_ , he wanted to say, but he suspected any attempt at speech would cause his tongue to simply snap off at the root and crumble to dust, and also that he might very well make a complete idiot of himself if he he tried. From somewhere pleasingly nearby came the sound of chipped ice and water pouring together and then the proper hospital equivalent of a bendy straw was at his lips and Gabriel Reyes, looking as though he hadn’t slept any time in the recent past, was looking down on him with something other than total benevolence in his dark eyes. “Better?”

“Yeah,” Jesse replied, or at least that was the intent -- he couldn’t quite get his freshly reconstituted tongue and teeth cooperating long enough to form sounds recognizable as human speech -- and Reyes gave him a little more water to help the process along.

“You know where you are?” Reyes pulled a chair over and hunkered down more closely at his bedside, setting the cup down in easy reach.

Jesse strongly felt this question deserved, at the very least, a highly expressive eye-roll but he found himself unable to get his eyes to agree with that sentiment and settled for croaking, “Hospital?”

“Close enough. The Watchpoint Bogata infirmary. You’ve been here a few days now.” And then he smiled, the tight-lipped, narrow-eyed Commander Gabriel Reyes-is-not-actually-amused-by-your-shit expression that probably should have qualified as some sort of harbinger of the oncoming apocalypse in at least a few world religions. “Do you remember how you got here, _cabron_?”

“Uhm.” Reyes only broke out the Spanish endearments of that particular type when someone got caught being _actively_ too stupid to live -- and, try as he might, he could not recall any outstanding instances of failure in his personal intelligence-survival interface. Of course, he could also not remember how he came to be in a position where he had to take the continued existence of his toes as a matter of faith. “No?”

“No? Well. Let me refresh your memory. We are on station at a little half-horse town in Vaupes Department, a backwater on the left asscheek of nowhere whose _sole_ attractions are a better-than-average grade of homebrew and its convenience to any number of uncharted roads and hidey-holes that we think, but cannot yet prove, are being used to move illegal narcotics _and_ human merchandise into position for pickup by unscheduled stops along the Trans-Amazonian hypertrain line.” Reyes leaned in and that leading-edge-of-the-apocalypse smile got even thinner. “We spent two months collecting enough actionable intelligence to justify calling in a full fire team, which we do, to drop the hammer of Overwatch’s formal disapproval of these sorts of shenanigans, which we also do. And _then_ do you know what happened?”

“Let me guess,” Jesse croaked. “Somebody did something stupid?”

“ _Yes._ A certain young rock-chewing moron of my acquaintance suffered one of those little heat-of-the-moment brain dysfunctions that caused him to forget that his commanding officer is _literally_ the product of a military super science project that would not in any way be out of place in the pages of a comic book and, consequently, is one of the two hardest to kill individuals he is ever likely to meet. His commanding officer further enhances this radically heightened degree of survivability by wearing ballistic tactical armor mounted with not one but three kinetic dump field generators -- just in case _one_ decided to punk out at the worst possible moment -- and learned how the fuck to duck, cover, and return fire while the rock-chewing moron was still bouncing on his abuela’s knee.” The end-of-days not-smile slid off his face and one hand found his in the mess of covers and tubes and lead wires. “For _fuck’s sake,_ kid. Do you see this? This is a gray hair. _You are giving me gray hair, McCree, and I am officially not old enough for that yet._ ”

“Sorry, boss.” It was a just a tad disturbing, how little he could feel Reyes’ grip on his hand. “Lost my head.”

Reyes was silent for a long moment, though clearly not for want of things to say. When he finally spoke, it was low and soft, “No -- you lost something else, though I suppose I should tell you that it’s the inevitable consequence of engaging in a point-blank exchange of fire with a goddamned slaver firing pulse rounds. Dr. Ziegler is going to want to see you when you’re stable enough to med-evac back to Switzerland.”

Jesse blinked several times, that information filtering in slowly and generally refusing to make sense. “Doc _Ziegler?_ The glowy one with the halo? And the wings? _That_ Doc Ziegler?”

“It’s not actually a halo but to answer your question...yes. She’s going to need to examine you,” Gently, “before she can fit you for your new prosthesis.”

Jesse stared blankly at him. “...What?”

“You’re almost luckier than you have any right to be, kid. Luckier than the other guy, at any rate -- he’s missing his head from the collarbones up. You’re just going to have to learn how to shoot right handed.” Jesse opened his mouth to argue the point, looked down, and realized for the first time that Reyes’ hand was resting on nothing _but_ the mass of tubes and lead wires attached to the heavily bandaged stump where his left arm had previously resided. “It’s called phantom sensation. They’ll give you all the literature and a bunch of best-case scenario bullshit about how eventually it can fade but I can say, with a fair degree of certainty, that no, it will not. But there are ways to cope with it.” He half-rose, stopped, bent close. “Your commanding officer does not require his dumbass shavetail with more brass than brains to take any bullets for him. Nor does said dumbass have one goddamned thing left to prove to anyone, senior strike commanders inclusive, and he should start remembering that from here on out. I’ll let the doctors know you’re awake.” He paused at the door, glanced back over his shoulder, something close to a real smile quirking the corner of his scarred mouth. “While I’m on the topic of more brass than brains -- the _firstborn son and heir_ of the Shimada-gumi, kid. That’s reaching high even by my liberal standards but, just between us? I hope it works out better for you than it did for me.” 

The door slid open and beyond it lay nothing but lacy, iridescent, weirdly beautiful curtains of fire.

Jesse McCree woke with a low, throbbing ache where his left arm had been and a howl of grief caught firmly behind his teeth. The firstborn son and heir of the Shimada-gumi slept, undisturbed, at his back, one arm still slung over his middle and the other beneath his head, the pale light filtering past the shutters doing a particular kindness to the sharp planes and angles of his face, the fine, almost painted-in streaks of silver at his temples, the lashes and lips any woman would envy quite easily. Jesse breathed and focused on the play of shadows across Hanzo’s face, until the urge to scream crawled back down his throat and the memory of splintered bone and pulped flesh and shredded muscle faded back to where it belonged. Tried to let the combined warmth of their bodies and the rhythm of Hanzo’s sleeping breath lull him back to sleep and failed utterly. Getting out of bed without waking him while one armed was a matter of moving in slow degrees and he twitched the sheet slightly higher on Hanzo’s chest once he was free, lest the change in temperature undo all his hard work. Showered before he bothered retrieving his arm from the living/sitting/working room floor, ran the reattachment diagnostics while he put coffee on to brew and turned on the tiny holotank in silent mode to catch up on the news. 

He never had developed the necessary level of neuromechanical control that would have allowed him to shoot left-handed again and at this point likely never would -- there was nothing wrong with Doc Ziegler’s work when it came to the prosthesis itself, the problem lay somewhere in his head and his nerves, and so he learned to shoot as well as he ever had with the right. Other adjustments came more easily, such as precisely judging how hard to squeeze not easily crushable things, though he still preferred not to take the risk when it came to whiskey glasses and teacups and human bodies, which had required the acquisition of an entirely different set of skills. Ambidexterity came with practice and now he could pour himself a cup of coffee with his left hand and switch the newsvid streamers over to the English language feed with his right because he was too tired to successfully catch more than every third word in Cantonese and things were starting to look hairy if that churning multicolored blob in the tank was any indication. The city’s storm-warnings were still hovering at Signal 3 but the storm was starting to settle into its final landfall track and the hit was coming. The civil defense authority was spitting out bulletins and advisories for locals, tourists, and travelers, advising the imminent arrival within the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours of hurricane force winds, a storm surge of eighteen to twenty feet, and the closure of the port, the capsule transport system, and every airport and hypertrain line along the Pearl River delta and deep into the near mainland provinces. The port authority was already turning incoming sea traffic back out into deeper water and rushing the unloading of ships at harbor; a currently-voluntary soon-to-be-mandatory evacuation order was in place for the lower levels of the stanchion residential zones, the typhoon shelters being opened and made ready. 

Which, frankly, substantially complicated a great many things that were already difficult enough without factoring in the dick-twisting exigencies of the _weather._ Doc Ziegler and Morrison were only going to be in the city for another day or two, at most, provided they didn’t get stranded by the storm -- they might even dust out prior, conference or no conference, if it meant not being trapped in a hotel on mandatory storm shelter lockdown for who knows how long. And unless fortune smiled upon them in a fashion far more outrageous than average, their business with Ts’ong Ju-zheng was going to need to be resolved by the most expedient method possible, since the little bastard seemed perversely disinclined to cooperate with their efforts at subtlety and the long route was about to become closed to them. 

But first he was going to have to call Doc Ziegler and getting to that point required the consumption of two cups of coffee and the rest of the rice from the day before, mixed together with an egg and some green onions and a dash of the hottest pepper sauce they had on hand, and another hour fiddling around with some scrap paper and a pen trying to get exactly the right tone of contrition, until he finally gave up on procrastinating and punched her hotel room’s number into the comm. He expected to get the room message service but instead he got her, looking freshly woken herself and slightly less perfectly shevelled than usual. “Jesse?”

“Hey, Doc. Uhm.” Talking to the messaging service would have been a thousand orders of magnitude easier. “Listen. We talked it over last night after we left.”

Someone -- probably Morrison -- handed her a steaming cup from outside the comm’s video pickup and she sipped, blue eyes wide. “I thought your decision was rather firmly made.”

“So did I.” Make that _two_ thousand orders of magnitude and possibly all the orders of magnitude until the end of time. “As it turns out, I was moderately wrong about that and, uh, we’d like to take y’all up on your offer. If it’s still open, that is.”  
The corners of her mouth struggled for a moment before settling on the sort of tremulously beatific smile that induced everyone who looked upon it to want to do their best of all of humanity. He was utterly, completely doomed, and knew it at once. “Of course, Jesse. It would never have been closed to you. And Genji will be...I suppose _delighted_ is a good enough word but…”

“How did I not guess you already had Shimada Minor back in the stable?” It was done and now he wanted to melt into the floor as a tension he hadn’t been aware of flowed out of every muscle. “Where are we going? Gibraltar?”

“Gibraltar. Winston and Reinhardt are, as you might put it, holding down the fort right now -- do you remember Brigitte? Reinhardt’s granddaughter? She is his mechanic now.” She waved Morrison over and he joined her in front of the comm, holding his own coffee and a sheaf of papers.

“She was knee-high to a grasshopper the last time I saw her.” A grave little thing too wise for her years, as he recalled it, the diametric opposite of her huge, and hugely bombastic, grand-daddy.

“She has most definitely blossomed.” It had to be a trick of the light but it definitely looked like the good Doc Ziegler was blushing, just a bit. “We have others on their way in by various routes but no confirmation at this moment of who has arrived thus far -- an abundance of caution has been the order of the day.”

“Understandable.” Morrison handed her the sheaf of papers and they exchanged a peaceable enough nod of greeting. “Hanzo and I have some affairs that we need to put in order before we can bug out with a clean conscience.”

“Oh?” Morrison gave him a not-particularly-decipherable look over the top of his coffee cup.

“You’re aware of that clusterfuck going down up north, yeah?” And now he had their undivided attention. “Best part about of where that’s located is that it’s kept the collateral damage to a minimum. Worst part is that it’s reasonably clear the RDF is pretty much just holding the line and, unless something changes, it’s going to break eventually. Right now, anybody who can afford to do so and a lot of folks who can’t are doing their best to get out of the potential splash zone. And you know what _that_ means, right?”

“Just how bad is the refugee trafficking problem in this neck of the woods?” Morrison asked, with the glint in his eye that had always suggested someone’s shit was about to get sorted with extreme prejudice.

“Not good and getting steadily worse. Our client is a junior Russian consular official whose nephew was one of the lucky ones -- he managed to get away before anything _too_ horrible happened to him.” He paused and had to look away from the expression on Doc Ziegler’s face.

“The local authorities -- “ She began.

“-- Are completely indifferent to complaints made by non-citizen refugees who don’t speak a lick of any dialect of Chinese, no matter who their family might be. Well, all right, not _completely_ they're at least _considering_ his application for temporary residency.” He opened a subsignal and fired off the contents of their research files. “We’ve been digging at it for the last little while and managed to find a point of linkage at the Banco Comercial branch office -- it appears that at least one of the officers in their digital currencies division is an active participant in a money laundering operation used by our trafficker friends to hide their ill-gotten gains. We’ve been building a dossier on him and keeping him under remote surveillance but he’s been cagey enough thus far that he hasn’t led us directly to any other involved parties.”

“What’s your backup plan?”

“Breaking into his place, stealing the Hell out of any and all incriminating data he’s been concealing from his employers, and turning it over to our client, who has already indicated a willingness to do the heavy lifting with the authorities, if necessary.” He smiled wryly. “Evidence talks, moral outrage walks, can’t say I completely blame them.”

“Point. How long do you think that’ll take?” Morrison, it seemed, was more than willing to let bygones be bygones.

“Depends on my partner’s assessment of the situation -- he’ll be doing the actual breaking and entering, after all. And this fucking storm. Speaking of which -- “

“The conference organizers are actively considering cancelling the remainder of the event in order to allow the attendees to evacuate the city if they wish,” Doc Ziegler interjected, looking up from the paperwork. “We should contact Lena and ask for her assessment of the risks of remaining much longer, as well.”

“Lena will say _I’ve always wanted to fly through a Cat Five typhoon, loves, let’s suit up_!” They all closed their eyes and groaned softly, almost simultaneously, because there was absolutely no way not to hear that in her voice and acknowledge it as an absolute fact of reality. “But, yes, we should at least call and give her the chance to surprise us.”

“If your conference _does_ get canceled, and you don’t want to hunker down in palatial splendor with twenty-four hour room service, you can always come over to Zhuhai and we’ll put you up.” They were both staring at him and for a moment he wished he had something in his coffee cup, so he could hide behind it. “We’ve got space. Not a _lot_ of space -- “

“But we would, nonetheless, be happy to have you,” Hanzo leaned down into the comm’s video feed, not quite resting his chin on Jesse’s shoulder, “And also to accept any advice or assistance you might wish to offer.”

Doc Ziegler was definitely, obviously blushing now. “We will bear that in mind -- could you give us a few hours to determine our own course of action?”

“Certainly, darlin’,” Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Hanzo smiling his not-entirely-reassuring, enjoying-this-just-a-little-too-much smile, one of the rarest of all his not-grim expressions and wondered momentarily as to its cause. “We’ll talk atcha later.”

The comm went dark and Jesse leaned back against Hanzo’s chest, found himself wrapped in Hanzo’s arms, and let his head fall back, neck a wet noodle as the stress fled it, all at once. “You really okay with that?” 

“If I were not, I would not have said it,” Hanzo replied, fondly. “Idiot.”

“Yeah, yeah, we are _all_ aware of my tragic deficiencies in the brains category,” He pressed a kiss to the angle of Hanzo’s neck and jaw. “What d’you need to get ready to wreck poor little Ts’ong Ju-zheng’s life?”

“Cha siu bao. Immediately, if not sooner, while there is still somewhere open to find it.” Hanzo smiled thinly. “All of my other preparations were in place _weeks_ ago.”

“Okay, okay, let me find a pair of pants you didn’t _cut off me_ in a transport of passion and we’ll get your little pork balls…”

Fortunately, the local teahouse was the sort of place that closed for nothing, not even massive encroaching typhoons, and thus they were not forced to plan any acts of reasonably grand data larceny dim-sum-less. They had, weeks before, located the domicile of the oleaginous Ts’ong Ju-zheng and it was one of the reasons why they settled in Zhuhai themselves, that place being the first of the arcologies Vishkar was contracted to build along with the new transit system. Part luxury residential space for the moneyed employees of the financial services sector, part luxury commercial space for the moneyed employees of the financial services sector, and part urban farm space meant to reduce the city’s reliance on staple food imports, it was the fully functioning showpiece that had scored Vishkar an even bigger foot in the door, its living and working spaces ardently sought-after status symbols. Hanzo had paid a call on the real estate office in his _yes, I am, in fact, the lord of all I survey_ guise that opened doors and influenced people, took a tour of the premises, and while unfortunately, conveniently “lost” amid the splendor, installed a number of surprises that allowed them to remote monitor the arcology’s internal security systems, its incoming and outgoing communications, and watch the goings-on through a million little electronic eyes that covered nearly every inch of the place, public bathrooms notwithstanding. Ts’ong Ju-zheng had not scored any sort of corner penthouse -- he was flush with both well and ill-gotten gains but those sorts of digs required seniority as well as disposable income. Instead, he lived in a two-story condo on the arcology’s inner circle, just off the largest of the pleasure gardens, a confection of waterfalls and mature trees imported from all over the world and a couple acres of actual lawn interspersed with flowerbeds and boxwood topiaries in the undulating shape of dragons and phoenixes and swimming carp.

Ts’ong had been in all day, working by remote from his home office, apparently on perfectly ordinary workaday business for people who didn’t sell desperate refugees into slavery for a living. Jesse found that a cause for mild disgruntlement, as catching the unctuous little bastard that had forced him to consult a thesaurus to find adequate synonyms for “slimy” for the first time since middle school science in the midst of something genuinely loathsome would have made his heart sing a song of unfettered joy. Hanzo, being the spawn of ninjas, required no particularly compelling reasons to end someone on his best day, wanted to take the most direct and expedient route from the start, and responded to Jesse’s prevailing level of dissatisfaction with an all-the-leftovers hotpot as the afternoon drew on and spreading out all his non-projectile weapons on his side of the table for a proper sharpening and oiling while they ate.  
“We can’t kill him,” Jesse replied, repressively, to this unspoken request.

“‘We’?” Hanzo replied, sweetly.

“Don’t do this to me, Shimada. Do not make me be the voice of reason and plead for the life of this,” Jesse opened up the thesaurus on his workpad, “ _muculent_ little fucker. _Please,_ if you love me even a little.”

“As you wish,” Hanzo inclined his head a fraction and rolled his knives, needles, and assorted other pointy, stabby things back up in the little silk-lined pack he kept them in when they weren’t up his sleeves. “I will not kill him. And you will stop complaining that, when he is not -- “ He snatched the workpad, “ -- being an actively saponaceous accessory of the slave trade, he is merely a banker. A banker who will likely spend the rest of his life in prison once this comes to light. And take comfort in that.”

“‘Saponaceous, I like that one. Rolls off the tongue.” He finished his broth. “You ready?”

“Almost. Let me put my game face on.”

Hanzo’s game face, in this instance, involved the sort of wardrobe that would not have looked out of place in any executive boardroom anywhere on the face of the Earth accessorized with a hard-sided instrument case that looked to contain a cello but actually held an assortment of portable storage media, quite a bit of neatly folded personal body armor, and, in the event that a number of things went spectacularly south all at once, his bow and a fully-loaded quiver. He arrived at the main entrance of the arcology in a specially hired for the occasion luxury personal transport capsule and swiped himself in using a perfectly legit all-access residential passkey associated with an actual, perfectly legit apartment located in the short-term-rental-only tier, presently occupied by Hanzo’s _Master of All I Survey_ persona and the completely fictitious name on his otherwise indistinguishable from real fake ID. Jesse watched him pass the gates from a reasonable distance and altitude, then activated his onboard workscreen and watched the transponder ping representing him briskly make its way through the halls, up a dozen levels, and into his personal staging point, another half-dozen levels below Ts’ong’s own but roughly coincident in terms of alignment with the central core of the arcology. The in-ear comm unit crackled gently, interference from the storm, and Hanzo murmured, “In.”

“On my way.” Jesse, by way of contrast, came in through the back door, literally, using a briefly purloined, then cloned, then returned night shift janitorial/groundskeeper passkey, the use of which would excite no attention whatsoever in the arcology’s security system and yet allow him access to everywhere he needed to be to play his part in the evening’s festivities. Put on a gray work coverall and a pair of gloves to hide the metal hand, add a hover-cart of gardening equipment, and fundamental invisibility was acquired, the arcology’s residents more or less content to completely ignore your existence provided you did nothing to acquire their notice. And he had, in the last five years, gotten fairly good at not acquiring notice unless he wanted it.

He ditched the cart as soon as he let himself into the park’s never-seen-by-the-residents employee access corridors but kept the gloves and the coverall and slung a pair of what he assumed were a particularly deadly sort of hedge clippers over his shoulder as he ventured out into the park itself. Once there he kept up a brisk, totally-belong-to-be-here, absolutely-know-where-I’m-going pace along a circuitous route to the observation nest they’d picked out some time prior, in the upper branches of a genuine grandfather tree quite possibly lifted out of some rundown European castle’s conservatory, one that afforded him a virtually unobstructed physical view of the several layers of promenade surrounding Ts’ong Ju-zheng’s front door, as well as the door itself. He flipped open the workscreen mounted in his arm and, using the backdoor they’d chiseled open, plugged into the arcology security network, his presence as accepted, and as invisible, as any legitimate user’s would be. 

“On station, looking at his door now.” Jesse flipped open a handful of secondary screens, located Hanzo making his final preparations, located Ts’ong stretched out at his ease downstairs in the condo’s entertainment suite with a beer and an eye-wateringly nasty horror flick in the holovid tank, pinged the transponders of all the security agents between Hanzo and their target and then located them all using the thousand or two security cameras available on the intervening levels. “Security’s almost done their mid-evening sweep.”

“Excellent.” Hanzo cast a glance up the security camera, one of their own that they’d placed in the rental for pure independent visual confirmation purposes, and smiled tightly. “A quarter hour?”

“Timing looks good for that,” Jesse informed him, a half an eye on the security transponder pings, the other half on Ts’ong, who was now moving about in the little kitchenette, fetching himself another beer and a snack. “Looks like he’s settling in for the long haul in front of the tank -- “

A minor-key tone sounded in his ear and a secondary panel opened in Ts’ong’s screen, something hitting on the condo’s internal motion detection network -- something emphatically not him, for it was registering in one of the upstairs hallways. “Wait a minute. Motion detector’s showing activity elsewhere in the premises, he might not be alone. Let me look.” He switched the camera feed off the security types, who were already filtering back into their local station offices anyway, and over to Ts’ong’s place -- upper hallways, master suite, private office, guest quarters -- and found them empty. He pulled up each room and hall individually just to make sure he wasn’t missing someone walking briskly from room to room and caught nothing but a flicker of shadow sliding across the walls in the indirect lighting and the gently waving fronds of potted plants caught in the breeze from the air circulation system, a complete lack of any other hits on the motion detector. “ _Nada._ Might be interference in the system from the storm.”

“Mm.” Hanzo caught his eye again through the camera. “I am going for our target.”

“No reason not to.” There wasn’t any reason -- the insertion and extraction timing was not to-the-second arduous, the security drones were back in their stations for the evening sweep report, the rest of Ts’ong’s place was empty, and for some reason the hackles on the back of his neck absolutely refused to lie back down. “Be careful.”

“Always.” Hanzo did that thing where he just seemed to slide casually out of view, even right in front of a camera, and in a moment he was a steadily moving transponder ping on Jesse’s comm screen, not even the arcology’s internal security up to the task of latching onto him.

Jesse let out an irritated hiss of breath between his teeth and brought the camera feed covering Ts’ong and his terrible taste in movies up into the main panel. Honestly, he did not know how the man could slurp dandan so enthusiastically while watching nubile coeds being chainsawed in half --

The motion detector pinged again -- pinged twice, once in the private office upstairs, aligning with Hanzo’s transponder signal nearly to the millimeter. The other hit was in the excessively ornate circular staircase that linked the floors together. Jesse split the panel, keeping Ts’ong in one, opening a second pane for the office cameras, and a third for the staircase which, of course, didn’t cover the whole thing because it was a goddamned circular corkscrew. As he watched a shadow flickered across the outer curve of the staircase.

There weren’t any plants in the staircase -- the risers weren’t quite wide enough to allow anything to be set on them and permit safe transit at the same time -- and nothing else hanging in it that might flutter enough to cast a moving shadow. Or any shadow at all, for that matter.

“Hanzo,” Jesse breathed quietly, “How long do you need?”

He was at Ts’ong’s terminal, industriously and expeditiously making short work of the security using an assortment of artfully thieved passwords stolen just for this eventuality, three separate portable drive units plugged into assorted receptacles, just waiting to receive the evidence of their target’s perfidy. He glanced over his shoulder at the camera. “Perhaps five minutes. Why?”

“Not sure, but the motion detector just registered another hit, in the stairwell. I thought I saw -- “ His mouth snapped shut as the sound, distant and attenuated by the condo’s relatively decent soundproofing, reached him through Hanzo’s comm.

“Gunfire,” Hanzo announced with almost preternatural calm and continued about his business.

“ _Abort,_ ” Jesse snapped, unzipping the damned coverall that hid and also restricted access to all his personal armaments and wriggling out of it as best he could, “Right now, Hanzo, get the fuck out of there.”

“Keep watch. This will only take a moment.” Hanzo triggered the download and rose, reaching for his bow.

“God _damn_ it, Shimada, you stubborn -- stupid --” He left the coverall hanging over the branch and scrambled down, just managing not to break his neck and scaring the living holy Hell out of someone’s grandma, out walking the dog, as he hit the ground. He pulled Ts’ong’s video feed up and was rewarded with the supremely unedifying sight of the man sprawled on his couch, sans face and most of the back of his head, just as the motion detector pinged multiple moving hits in the staircase, headed up. “Motion detector’s hitting, no visual confirmation -- I can’t get a good look in the staircase.”

Behind him, somebody’s grandma started screaming her head off and her dog added to the chorus as he sprinted across the lawn towards Ts’ong’s door. The passkey he had wouldn’t open the door and he swore quietly over the failure of planning that led them to _not_ clone a key belonging to the domestic staff, too, even as he tore the cover off the lockbox, slid a magnetized blank into the exposed slot, and initiated a blunt-force override of the locking mechanisms -- blunt enough that the security alarms that seemed thus far peacefully oblivious to the grand larceny and bloody murder taking place just on the opposite side of the door went off at once, up and down the main thoroughfare. The locks, subjected to a few too many contradictory inputs, threw up their little lock hands and disengaged; he ducked inside, just as the sound of human and omnic security personnel responding to the source of the disturbance became audible, and threw the internal security bars. In his ear, he heard the song of Hanzo’s bow string.

“ _Talk to me!_ ” He sprinted out of the entry vestibule and through the late, not particularly lamented Ts’ong’s living room, doing his best to avoid running through the gradually expanding pool of blood spreading out from his for the moment final resting place.

“I have the data,” Hanzo replied, still imperturbably calm, and Jesse could have strangled him -- would _most definitely strangle him_ at least a little if they got out of this with their necks intact. “Do you remember the image that your comrades showed us from Watchpoint Gibraltar?”

“Are you _fucking kidding me?_ ” Jesse skidded into the bottom of the stairwell and activated his workscreen, accessed the cameras, scanned everything scannable -- the door to Ts’ong’s study looked like it had taken a couple close-range hits from a shotgun with a tightly constricted choke, the edges of the pattern blackened and still smoldering gently in some places where the shot had punched through, but whoever had done the shooting was nowhere visible. 

“No,” Hanzo kicked the door open as he watched and stepped out, bow at the ready, an arrow in the string, the tiniest trace of not-quite-normal glow shimmering just below the surface of his tattooed left arm. “Where are you?”

“Bottom of the stairs. I’m coming up,” And so saying, he put his foot on the first riser, started turning his back to keep it to the outer staircase wall, and something caught him by the back of the neck -- something hard and sharp and metallically cold -- and slammed him face-first into the central support pillar.

The entirely involuntary sound that came out of him was more surprise than pain, even as a spectacular fireworks display went off inside his skull from the sheer force of impact, more than half-falling to his knees as he tasted blood and saw nothing but extraordinarily vivid flashes of colorless light before his eyes. Whatever it was did not relinquish its grip on the back of his neck but instead dug in deeper, cold metal piercing his skin on both sides as it dragged him bodily back out of the stairwell. 

“ -- answer me -- “ He heard, through the ringing in his ears. “ _Jesse._ ”

He opened his mouth to answer and found himself, abruptly, unable to do so, lungs spasming helplessly around a convulsive cough as they filled with something thick and smoky that tasted of vaporized metal and burning blood. Something cold and sharp almost delicately plucked the comm unit out of his ear and from some vast and increasing distance he heard the most spine-curlingly horrible voice it was ever his displeasure to meet all but _purring,_ “My apologies, but Agent McCree will not be taking any more calls this evening.”

One high-pitched audio feedback squeal and an audible crunch of reasonably delicate technology being summarily destroyed later and he was being dragged across Ts’ong’s sitting room floor, trying to breathe through a cloud of smoke more noxious than the worst cigar he’d ever voluntarily put in his mouth. His eyes flooded involuntarily with tears whenever it flowed up into them and it was through a sticky, watery mess that he finally saw what had him -- impossibly tall from the angle he was at, shrouded and hooded in black splashed with red and silver, edges slightly blurry, breathing out black mist, its face an expressionless, bone-white mask. 

It occurred to him, as his head started to clear, that he was very likely about to die. It also occurred to him that, in a handful of seconds or less, Hanzo was going to be at the bottom of those stairs and then, shortly thereafter, he might very well die too. The final conclusion he reached at that very instant was that the high pitched whine drilling into his ears had nothing to do with the effects of a concussion and _far_ more in common with the telltale sound of a heavy pulse weapon cycling up to full-power fire and somewhere quite nearby, too.

His captor -- who was, of course, called Reaper the deeply unhelpful little voice in his head that remembered stuff like that at the worst possible times reminded him graciously -- apparently recognized that sound, as well, for his response to it was _astonishingly_ profane. And then he wasn’t so much sliding as being _flung_ the length of the room, as far from the door as it was possible to get without actually going through the far wall, with a mass of smoky doom crouched over him in a fashion the little voice in his head was tempted to call _defensive._

The door exploded inward with a force that sprayed fragments of reinforced steel shrapnel in a fan that punched through the vestibule and the stairwell beyond, peppered a good chunk of the sitting room, but didn’t _quite_ reach them, the smoke shrouding them rippling in the overpressure wake. A fully charged pulse round was a fire-and-forget munition in close quarters -- even if it didn’t hit its intended target, once it made contact with _something,_ everyone in the immediate vicinity was going to regret being there, provided they lived long enough to regret anything. 

His heart nearly stopped right then and there. “ _Han --_ ”

A cold, claw-tipped hand closed over his mouth, muzzling him quite efficiently, as Reaper rose to one knee, drawing a weapon from...somewhere that the confluence of his eyes and brain wouldn’t let him quite understand because it seemed _just slightly_ impossible and waited for what would come through the now technically opened door. Jesse frankly thought an omnic security drone more than a little likely given the circumstances and was just as frankly astonished when it was not. 

“Put it down,” The full-face tactical mask would likely have provided sufficient anonymizing effect to anyone that hadn’t spoken to him recently, and the visor hid his eyes, one of his most strikingly memorable features. “And step away from him. _Now._ ”

The laugh that came out of that mask was _almost_ worse than the voice itself. “Or...what? You pull the trigger here and now, and the evening ends with you scraping him off the walls with a spatula, _abuelo._ ” The grip on his face tightened just slightly and gave a jaunty little shake for emphasis. 

Jesse McCree wondered several things at that moment. The first was how slowly he would have to move in order to draw Peacemaker and end this particular Mexican standoff at point-blank range, and if he could do it before his jaw and the rest of his face parted ways. The second was whether Jack Morrison, who was dressed like the heavily armored love-child of Evel Knievel and Elvis, was seriously considering just shooting them both, because he had not yet removed his finger from the trigger of that rather impressively sized and fully charged pulse rifle. And the third was where, precisely, Hanzo Shimada was at that very instant because, if he was about to do something suicidally reckless, he did not necessarily want to do it at an angle where he could see it happening. With excruciating slowness, he thumbed the strap of his thigh holster loose, the sound horribly loud in his own ears, and the last of his questions answered itself. He did not _quite_ see Hanzo actually leave the relative cover of the stairwell -- he was doing that thing that made it hard for people even looking dead at him to properly perceive him, the product, he’d said once, of a rigorously cultivated and intense inner stillness -- but he could hardly miss the results, namely the single smoothly fired on the move arrow that was now occupying the barrel of Reaper’s gun.

He almost got Peacemaker clear enough to take a shot -- _almost,_ and then the back of his skull hit the wall with bone-cracking force and the grip tightened on his jaw, hard enough to draw blood. Reaper hurled his now-jammed weapon hard and accurately at Morrison’s head and collected, for his trouble, two more arrows, perfect center-of-mass shots that would have punched through any reasonable grade of armor and Jesse could hardly blame Hanzo for the language he deployed upon seeing them have no noticeable effect. A jolt passed through him and he felt for a moment as though he’d touched his tongue to something electric, the taste of scorched metal growing stronger, those misty tendrils circulating around them grew somehow more solid and he felt substantially less solid and he sensed _something_ about to happen. 

Hanzo’s fourth arrow punched through Reaper’s wrist and his grip slackened, involuntarily, as it severed tendons, and the nearly-electric circuit between them _snapped._ One instant he was there and, between one blink and the next, he was gone -- vanished as quickly and completely as a shadow at noon.

Hanzo was at his side more or less instantly and through the rather pronounced blur in his vision he noted a remarkable lack of shrapnel wounds. “That,” He informed his partner, who was busily checking him over for similar, “was _fucking awesome._ Don’t ever do it again.” 

“You are injured,” Hanzo replied, tightly, through clenched teeth. “Do not move more than you must.”

“I -- “ He tried to sit up, and discovered himself in no way capable of doing so under his own power, the blur in his vision turning the world into smears of color graying at the edges, “Dammit.” 

“I’ll hand it to you, kid, I ever thought I’d see the day someone finally cracked that thick skull of yours.” Morrison was a ridiculous primary colored blur on the other side. “Literally. I suggest you take your friend’s advice.” His comm chimed audibly as he activated it. “Tracer, meet us as the coordinates I just sent you. Ten minutes. We’re likely to be dusting off under fire, security here’s in a bit of a tizzy. Let Mercy know we’ve got wounded -- fractured skull, concussion, possibly more. Seventy-six, out.”  
“Seventy-what-now?” Jesse managed to force that out, though possibly not quite as clearly as it could have been.

“You’ll find out soon enough.” Dryly. “Get yourselves down behind cover -- the secondary security teams are going to be crawling up our backs any time now.” A pause. “I’m guessing that’s your guy over there on the couch?”

“Yes.” Hanzo replied, the shrug clearly audible in his voice as he half-dragged, half-carried Jesse around that very piece of furniture. “Inasmuch as he laundered money for slavers, I feel some sorrow for his mother.”

“Remind me not to get on your bad side, Shimada-sama.” The pulse rifle began cycling again. “Stay down -- I’ll have our way out prepared momentarily.” 

“There is no external access from this layer,” Hanzo pointed out, in tones of sweet reason.

“ _Yet,_ ” Morrison replied, and opened fire.


	5. Reunions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A reunion of old friends and new at Watchpoint Gibraltar.

Extraction, as it turned out, took _way_ more than ten minutes.

“We are all going to die,” Hanzo remarked, almost casually, in the midst of providing exactly the sort of cover fire Jesse himself usually handled and which was currently as far beyond his capabilities as forcing his eyes to focus for more than a few seconds at a time or walking a straight line unaided.

“No, we’re not,” Morrison replied and for a moment -- just a moment -- Jesse was at least five years younger and perfectly inclined to believe anything that came out of that man’s mouth, because it was from there directly to God’s ear and Someone Else help Him if it didn’t happen double-quick. “Almost done.”

“Good,” In that same serene tone, “because I am almost out of arrows.”

They’d expended his supply of flash-bangs first, of course -- the plan, after all, was to get in, get what they needed for their client, and get out, preferably avoiding any contact whatsoever with arcology security. The plan, having made contact with something vaguely resembling an enemy, was now as utterly fucked as was possible for a plan to be, with arcology security _and_ a detachment of the local Zhuhai gendarmes nipping at their heels, and yet he found himself not entirely inclined to leave a trail of bodies primarily guilty of doing their jobs. His grenades were a two-generation improvement on the original less-lethal weapon, incorporated a pair of microburst EMP generators in deference to the existence of omnics as both combatants and noncombatants, and had, for a time, actually succeeded in rendering their immediate pursuit blind, deaf, dizzy, and forced to reboot. He did, however, have a limited number of the things and the arcology, for all practical intents and purposes, no limits and no particular hesitation when it came to throwing security goons at them once the first lots came crawling out, calling for backup. He didn’t suppose he could blame them, given the circumstances, an attitude not entirely shared by his partner, whose personal relationship with law enforcement had been firmly on the cool-bordering-on-cold side practically from the cradle and who saw little need to moderate it now. It was primarily in deference to his own feelings on the topic that nobody collected a titanium bodkin-point between the eyes and the scattershots were ever-so-carefully placed to only mangle whatever they hit a _little_ bit, which Jesse was perfectly prepared to consider a moral victory. 

“ _Down!_ ” Hanzo didn’t bother actually slinging his bow in response to that, just dropped and folded over him where he was already propped, mostly blind and completely useless, even with the old man’s biotic field generator working on him, in the lee of an internal structural support stanchion. Morrison did likewise for Hanzo and one breath, two breaths, three breaths later the floor shuddered and the local air temperature rose a double handful of degrees and smoke plumed past them in a wind-driven wave. They each had an arm under him before the vibrations finished echoing through the arcology’s superstructure, levering him to his feet and across the floor, out the rather neat breach punched in its side via the medium of jury-rigged high energy explosives. They were all three of them blown sideways almost instantly by the screaming sledgehammer wind, soaked to the skin by the rain coming down along with it in hard-driven sheets.

“Tracer,” Morrison, on his right, and sounding more than a little aggravated, “ _where are you?_ ” 

The angle of his head shifted upwards at whatever response he received and Jesse automatically followed it, even though there was no chance he’d actually see anything through his personal blur and the dark and the rain. He heard it, though, just at the edge of audibility -- whisper-soft engine noise, familiar as the sound of Hanzo’s breathing, and then the transport touched down on the plate in front of them, a lance of pale light falling over them as the sidelock cycled open.

“ _Hurry!_ " It was Angela and none of them seriously considered not doing so as the bravest of their pursuers started taking pot-shots from well behind the breach. “Tracer cannot hold station for long in this wind.”

The old man and Hanzo all-but shoved him inside and the good Dr. Ziegler, having no small amount of practical experience when it came to managing patients coming to her in distress, caught him as he stumbled, almost fell, and guided him to the nearest seatlike surface. More than a seat -- an acceleration cradle, it felt like, cushioned in a way that hugged the body -- and she laid him back in it with enormous care, rotated and locked it into position, and secured the five-point restraints. 

“Shimada-san,” Her accent was, he couldn’t help but notice, pronounced in the way it became only when she was too stressed to worry about smoothing it away, “please hand me the emergency medical kit.”

He did so, just as a secondary explosion caused their transport to wobble slightly where it sat, followed closely by the sound of the lock cycling closed again. “Tracer, we’re all aboard.”

“Sorry for the excitement just then, love -- we were having trouble holding position. It’s blowing more than half a gale.” Just hearing her voice over the intercom brought what he knew had to be the world’s stupidest grin to his face, even as Doc Ziegler began a thorough diagnostic survey of his body. “Won’t be able to move at maximum speed until we get above the windfield from the storm, but it’d be best if everybody got situated and buckled in before that -- there’ll be plenty of turbulence starting...well...right about now.”

“Hey, _Lena!_ ” Jesse croaked and was rewarded with an actual honest-to-God growl of annoyance from Doc Ziegler and a sound of perfect exasperation from Hanzo, one to each side. “How’ve you been?”

“Better than _you,_ ” Angela snapped. “Be _quiet,_ do not move _anything_ more than you must, and particularly not your head or neck.” From the feel of it, she had spontaneously developed a couple extra sets of hands as she examined him. “Shimada-san, hold this for a moment -- yes, right there -- “ He felt the nerve-strumming sensory rush of a biotic field, warm and soothing, wash over him and, an instant later, a second. “Jesse, we do not have the equipment I require to properly treat your injuries in the field kit but this should keep your condition stable until we reach Gibraltar. Please, _please,_ do not move.” 

He heard her rise and make her way forward and, in her absence, Hanzo settled in on his left side, fingers still cold and damp from the rain lacing together with his own. He didn’t try to turn his head but glanced sidelong as best he could, and found his partner a darkly shaded blur but at least a recognizable one. “Well -- that could have gone better.”

“Be quiet,” Hanzo replied, “or I will render you senseless in a manner that Dr. Ziegler will find perfectly acceptable.”

Jesse refrained mightily from muttering anything under his breath _out loud,_ knowing entirely too well that that wasn’t an idle threat, let his eyes drift closed since he couldn’t really see anything anyway. Doc Ziegler returned and settled herself back down next to him, the scent of her perfume vivid in the enclosed space of the transport and its recycled air. Listened to the engines cycling up to full power, a sound so deep in the lower registers it was almost imagination, braced himself unconsciously as Lena took them out over the delta and up at a rate of climb no commercial plane could match, the airframe vibrating with the force of the acceleration. Hanzo’s grip on his hand tightened a fraction as they were both pressed back into their seats and, shortly thereafter, enjoyed the stomach-lightening sensation of losing and/or gaining a couple thousand feet of altitude in a matter of seconds, depending on the wind. 

“Almost clear, everyone,” Lena’s voice came over the intercom again. “Just hold on tight a few more -- outbound to Watchpoint Gibraltar, ETA approximately 1500 hours local time. And I’ve been doing _just fine_ , thank you!”

Jesse smiled with the corner of his mouth that seemed willing to work at the moment and earned himself a noise from Doc Ziegler’s side of the acceleration cradle. The emergency medical kit snapped open again and her hand rested briefly on his shoulder, being careful not to dislodge the biotic emitter. “Does your face feel numb?”

“Um.” It took him a moment to organize both his senses and his feelings about them and then how to express those feelings which was, he admitted, a little worrying. “Kinda? More pins-and-needles tingly than numb really.” It was requiring way more work to make his tongue do its job than he liked. “What’s -- “

“Hush.” He did so and was rewarded by the blurry sight of her as she popped his eyelids open and shone an irritatingly bright light into them, one after the other. “Pupillary reaction is still normal for your present condition. No indicators yet of intracranial bleed. Can anyone describe to me how this happened?”

“The...individual...who assaulted Watchpoint Gibraltar attacked him.” Hanzo replied, tone glacially cool and with a certain promise of eventual violence lurking just under the frozen surface.

“Banged my head into a couple walls,” Jesse amplified, to the mutual disgruntlement of the caretakers to either side. “Which, honestly, sort of begs a question.”

“Perhaps when your brain is slightly less swollen,” Doc Ziegler made some adjustments to the biotic emitter field strength and the pins-and-needles faded a bit.

“Now, Doc, I’ve got a concussion and a seven hour plane ride ahead of us -- shouldn’t we be doing _something_ to keep me awake?” He replied sweetly. “We’re assuming Smoky the Not-Bear is the one who’s been hitting former Blackwatch agents, yeah?” A certain tense and uncomfortable silence ensued, the texture of which felt rather distinctly like an affirmation. “So why didn’t he just, oh, splatter the contents of my skull all over the walls? Because he could have. _Easily._ Had the drop on me and _everything._ ”

“If we knew exactly what was going on with this whole situation we wouldn’t need to bring you in, kid.” Morrison, he was not entirely surprised, tackled that one.

“I’m _thirty-seven_ , old man.” Jesse replied and was cut off from expanding upon that point by Hanzo’s fingers on his lips.

“How,” Hanzo asked, in his dangerously calm, contemplative voice, “did you know where we were? And that we required assistance?”

And if he thought the silence was tense and uncomfortable before, _that_ ratcheted things to the next highest level.

“We attempted to reach you earlier in the day,” Doc Ziegler, to his surprise, replied -- slowly and, he thought, carefully. “But we could not make contact via standard communication methods and the emergency commlink in your badge was turned off.”

“We were at our base of operations most of the day, making our final preparations.” Hanzo observed pointedly. “We received no communication attempts.”

“We guessed as much.” Morrison that time. “Your transponder was pinging from a relatively stable location in Zhuhai -- we moved when you moved.” A pause. “We would have been there _sooner_ but…” He could almost hear the aggravated gesture. “Security.”

“Did you know he -- it -- whatever was in Macau?” Jesse asked, suddenly almost inexpressibly weary.

“We suspected he might be close but we didn’t have actual confirmation of it until tonight. You two are good at keeping it under the radar but he’s better -- a good bit better. Than all of us.” It came out like it wanted to be grudging but couldn’t quite get there. “So, no, we weren’t letting you dangle hoping he’d bite. In fact, I wish to God he hadn’t.”

“You think he was interdicting your attempts to communicate with us,” Hanzo suggested and was rewarded with an affirmative grunt. “To what purpose?”

“My guess? To see how stupid I was willing to get on the topic.” Dryly. “And, as it turns out, the answer to that question was ‘pretty fucking stupid.’”

“Sounds like you’ve been playing this game for a while,” Jesse attempted neutrality, and didn’t quite get there; not quite a question, either.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘playing.’” Again, dry enough to suck all the moisture out of the air. “But, for the record? I’m not so sure he was planning to _kill you_ so much as _take you with him_ in a state that would render you mostly incapable of meaningful resistance. Such as you are right now. If your partner had interfered -- well, _you_ he’d have killed. No offense intended.”

“None taken.” He could hear the jet black amusement in Hanzo’s voice even if he couldn’t see the razor edged smile that accompanied it.

“Oh, you two are gonna get along just _fine,_ ” Jesse felt a rather distinct headache breaking through the biotic field. “Angie, darlin’, if you could sedate me right now, that’d be the nicest thing you could do.”

She did not, in fact, sedate him -- but she did adjust the biotic field levels a tad higher and gave him a shot of something on top, something that turned the insides of his skull from bruised and possibly bleeding pulp to light and swirly and mostly-painless pulp that didn’t actually mind bleeding just a bit. He could hear them still talking, intermittently, but it was at a far enough distance that he couldn’t quite work up the mental or physical energy necessary to try to listen, much less participate. He felt it, again at that comfortably insulating distance, when they touched down and a bit more clearly when they shifted him to a self-supporting field stretcher and off the transport -- the local air temperature cool enough to almost clear his head, more aware of his surroundings than he’d been for at least a few hours, Hanzo a solid presence to one side as they walked. Heard Angela’s clear, bright voice and Winston’s bass rumble as they consulted, picked a word or two out of the jumble: “nanosurgery suite” and “recovery bay” and “security precautions.” It was too bright inside to keep his eyes open without willfully causing himself pain and he wasn’t quite masochistic enough to invite any more of that just now and so he kept them closed. At some point, he wasn’t sure precisely when, Hanzo’s hand slipped out of his own and Doc Ziegler slipped a needle or two into his veins and mask over his face and within a breath or two he was fully and completely down past a point where pain could reach.

When he woke, it was all at once and completely, as though some part of him -- some _deeply mean_ and _completely unnecessary_ part -- decided that enough was enough and lazing around in a hospital bed could become habit-forming if he was allowed too much of it. Even so, he didn’t open his eyes immediately, from long force of habit in not entirely familiar surroundings, and for a moment he just listened. The room was quiet but for the hum of well-maintained medical equipment and the almost-silent ventilation, which didn’t surprise him -- Doc Ziegler had _rules_ about such things and in the years of their acquaintance, he’d only known two people capable of contravening them to any particular degree. And, even then, there were _consequences_. Against the background quiet, he heard someone not himself breathing, someone’s weight shifting in the cushions of the medieval torture devices pretending to be chairs generally to be found in Watchpoint medical facilities. He opened his eyes a fraction and found a sight he hadn’t expected to see waiting for him cross-legged in a chair no more than an arm’s length away. She had her elbows braced on her thighs as she read something deeply engrossing on her tablet, face framed in a curtain of chin-length black hair. A belt carrying her sidearm was handily slung over the back of the chair, the light from the screen casting her face in angular planes of shadow, the wadjet tattooed under her right eye a curl of darkness across her cheek.

“Fareeha,” He breathed and was rewarded by her grin as she looked up, not as engrossed as she was clearly pretending to be, “Fareeha Amari, as I live and breathe.”

“Jesse McCree and, yes, you do continue to live and breathe despite your best efforts to the contrary.” Fareeha turned off the tablet, set it aside, and suddenly he had her arms around his neck, hugging him hard; he realized, once the surprise wore off, that she might be crying. “You _jackass_. You _idiot_. Do you have _any idea_ how _afraid_ I’ve been for you -- you -- “

“Oh, honey.” His right arm was pinned beneath her and so he reached up with the blessedly still-connected left and gave her a decidedly awkward half-rub, half-pat on the back. “Little sister, it’s okay. Really, it is. I -- “

“ _You_ are a _damned liar_ , that’s what you are.” Fareeha let go of his neck long enough to sit up and glare righteous fury at him, wiping the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand. “A damned liar who is talking to a former Army officer and a current security contractor who is _more_ than capable of finding out anything I might need or want to know concerning the precise degree to which her lying liar who lies brother is wanted, in which jurisdictions, and how much anyone is willing to pay for possession of his intrinsically deceitful ass.” She appeared to be resisting the urge to punch him by the skin of her teeth. “Why didn’t you come to me? I could have done _something_ \-- “

“No, you couldn’t have.” He caught the hand closest to his own and gave it the gentlest squeeze he could manage. “And you need to stop thinking otherwise right now. Yeah, you could have tried, I don’t deny that, but what it would have cost you isn’t a price I was willing to let you pay. Still ain’t. What are you even doing here, I thought you had an actual _job_?”

“I’m using some of my two years of backed-up personal leave,” Fareeha admitted, and returned the squeeze. 

“Two years, huh. We need to find you a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Or one of each.” He found the bed controls and poked at them until he was in a reasonably upright position. 

“Oh, no. Don’t even _think_ you’re going to distract me from the asschewing you’ve earned by bringing up my sad lack of anything resembling a love-life and, by the way, while we’re on this topic,” She drilled him in the chest with the tip of one well-manicured finger, “ _Hanzo Shimada_.”

“Yup,” Jesse agreed, peaceably.

“ _Genji’s brother_.” She poked him again. “Does he _know_? And how did you two even meet? Please tell me it wasn’t at that thing in Mombasa, because I almost had a heart attack when I heard about that, there were Helix personnel involved -- “

“That thing in Mombasa was _not_ my fault, I just happened to be in the vicinity when it went down, and what was I supposed to do, just get out of the way? Really, woman, you know me better than that.” Fareeha was giving him the exact same sort of glare her late mother could bring to the table when confronted with something she considered unspeakably foolish and so he soldiered quickly on, “And, yes, Genji knows. In fact, Genji introduced us, a little over two years ago now. So, in essence, this is all his fault and if he’s traumatized by it he’s only got himself to blame.” He licked his lips a little. “...It’s really that obvious?”

“He pointedly refused to leave your bedside until the security arrangements were made to _his_ satisfaction, which included hand-selecting the people who’d be sharing ‘round the clock guard duty.” Fareeha actually smiled a little at that. “And, for the record? He’s sleeping next door, even so.”

“That’s my man.” Jesse found himself smiling a little, too.

“I admit, I’m somewhat torn between _I’m so happy for you_ and _what are you even thinking_.” Fareeha informed him. “‘So happy’ is currently winning, if only because I’m pretty sure he’s perfectly capable of discouraging anyone who tries to come after you and hiding the bodies of anybody who argues where they’ll never be found.”

Jesse, possessed as he was of rather precise knowledge when it came to the amount of body-hiding Hanzo had done in the last two years, merely nodded in agreement. There were some things it just wasn’t wise to tell any woman named ‘Amari’ about, particularly when she was already looking for a reason to keep chewing, and it was with a profound sense of gratitude in his heart that he greeted the door to the cubicle sliding open and Doc Ziegler striding inside. “And a good evening to you, Doc.”

“It is,” She consulted her watch, “1308 in the afternoon. But the sentiment is appreciated. How long has he been awake, Fareeha?”

“About fifteen minutes,” Fareeha retreated to the safe distance of her uncomfortable hospital chair. “And he’s been giving me backtalk, so I’m assuming that his brain’s no more damaged than usual.”

“Hey, now.” 

“Noted,” Doc Ziegler replied, the corners of her mouth twitching with undisguised amusement as she pulled up all the holoscreens ever in a neat crescent over his bed.

“ _Hey, now._ ”

“Don’t pretend you don’t love it,” Fareeha picked up her tablet and went back to reading.

“That is completely beside the point,” Jesse felt compelled to defend the tattered remnants of his honor.

Doc Ziegler _actually giggled_ , her eyes dancing with laughter.

“You two planned this so y’all could double-team me, didn’t you?” Jesse gave them both his best wounded-to-the-soul look. “How could you, Doc? I _trusted_ you.”

“No,” Doc Ziegler replied, almost but not quite managing to plane all the laughter out of her voice. “We did not _plan_ this. It was merely a happy coincidence that the nanocolony released its sedative hold while Fareeha was on watch, I assure you. Two hours give or take and it would have been either your companion or Reinhardt.”

“Oh my God. Hanzo met Reinhardt. Please, please, tell me that someone got video of it. _Please_.” Jesse managed not to blink as Doc Ziegler examined his pupillary reaction and made happy doctor noises.

“Yes, I am reasonably certain that more than one recording was made,” She murmured, and pulled up a few more diagnostic screens. “Now, on a more serious note, how do you feel?”

Jesse paused for a moment to consider that. “Not too bad? A little stiff from lying still for -- how long?”

“Slightly under two days,” Doc Ziegler glanced up from the screen she was reading. “Headache? Blurred or doubled vision?”

“Nope, nope, and nope.” He started to sit up a bit more and she waved him back down.

“Raise your left arm to shoulder height and flex the fingers of that hand.” He did so and was rewarded with some more happy doctor noises. “Sehr gut.” She settled down on the edge of the bed and started peeling wireless leads off him. “Briefly: you suffered a relatively uncomplicated linear fracture of the frontal bone of your skull and a second, rather more serious and potentially dangerous diastatic fracture of the parietal and occipital bones, one that caused the lambdoid suture to fully separate.”

Jesse rolled his eyes. “Now let’s assume that I haven’t spent the last five years of my life in medical school.”

“The fractures in the back of your skull could have killed you or paralyzed you for life,” She replied, bluntly.

“There we go! Why didn’t you lead with that, huh?” He flexed his hand again just for the comfort of it, this time. “What else?”

“Fortunately, the biotic emitters on the transport were sufficient to interdict the worst of the side-effects of the concussion and prevented the development of a severe epidural hemorrhage, though there was some intracranial bleeding.” She pulled up what he took to be a three-dimensional rendering of his skull as it had looked upon arrival and he had to admit that it appeared pretty grisly. “I injected a therapeutic nanocolony that repaired the damage to the dura mater -- the outermost meningeal membrane, the one that lies closest to the skull -- and drained the fluid buildup, flushed it, and injected two others, both of which are still suturing the fractures and assisting the natural healing process. They will remain in situ until that process is complete.”

“And you did it without shaving my head this time,” He grinned cheekily up at her and was rewarded with a sidelong look as only she could deliver it. 

“There was no need to shave your head this time, though that may change.” She replied briskly. “Winston would like to know if you have had any aftermarket work done on your direct neural interface implants since your last standard upgrade.”

“I also haven’t spent the last five years of my life rolling in the sort of cash that’d allow for such luxuries,” He handed her a few more monitor leads. 

“I will let him know -- I thought not but, well, I had to ask. He also requests the opportunity to examine your prosthesis -- there are some enhancements to its functionality he would like to discuss with you.” A certain puckish glint came into her eye. “Along with the standard upgrades, though he does allow that you’ve been keeping up maintenance.”

“I’m going to spend a month without a left arm, aren’t I?” Jesse asked, mournfully rhetorical. “Fine, fine, I know I’ll get no rest until I do. When am I getting outta here?”

“Right now. Your condition is stable enough that it no longer requires constant monitoring -- though I will ask you to check in every day or two. And to avoid slamming your head into anything for at least the foreseeable future.” She paused for an instant. “This is where I would usually lecture you about quitting smoking but the results of the general physical inventory scan suggest you have already done so. I thank you on behalf of your lungs.”

Fareeha looked wide-eyed at them both over the top of her tablet. “Wow. Really? Dare I ask what it took?”

“My lungs say ‘you’re welcome’ and what it took was a proper exchange of self-destructive vices -- I gave up one, and he,” Jesse hiked his thumb in the general direction of next door, “did likewise.”

Doc Ziegler shook her head and turned, opened a drawer which, as it turned out, contained clothes -- his own clothes, freshly laundered from the smell, his belt, weapons inclusive, and --

“ _My hat_ ,” He breathed as she deposited it on his head, being careful not to tug on it too vigorously. “I thought I’d lost it forever.”

“76 and I, ah, sort of broke into your apartment once we all decided you were coming with us.” He stopped and stared and she had the grace to blush and rub the back of her head, somewhat sheepishly. “He knew you would be heartbroken to lose it, so we took it with us when we went to rendezvous with you at the arcology -- a few other things, as well, but I knew you would want that back as soon as possible.”

He caught her hand and pressed a kiss, with all the applicable flourishes, to her knuckles. “You truly are an angel of mercy, Doc. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Now, if you fine ladies would step out for just a moment…?”

“I’ve seen you in your underwear,” Fareeha remarked, flatly, not looking up from her tablet.

“I’ve seen you in _less_ than your underwear. More than once,” Doc Ziegler amplified.

“Hanzo really put the fear of leaving me alone for even five lousy minutes into everybody at this Watchpoint, didn’t he?” Jesse groused. “Okay, _fine_. Just...turn around.”

They did and, because they were two women who had known him since he was seventeen years old, spent the whole couple minutes it took to make himself decent discussing the relative merits of boxers versus briefs vis a vis their qualities when it came to the average male rear. He told himself was not actually blushing, that he was _entirely too old_ to be blushing, that he had, at some point, picked up some sort of terrible side-effect nanoburn from all the treatments he’d just had and, gathering his dignity for the second time in a half-hour, announced, “Done. Next door, you said?”

“Across the hall,” Doc Ziegler, at least, managed to smother her grin. 

“Thank you kindly.” He tipped his hat, opened his own cubicle door, crossed the hall in two long strides, stepped into the room, planted his back against the door as it slid shut and engaged the locks a bit more firmly than was strictly necessary -- he swore, despite the soundproofing, he could hear the pair of them still laughing. _Lord, if you are going to afflict me with sisters, could you at least make it so they can’t gang up on me while I’m in my skivvies? Amen._

Someone -- possibly a deeply foolish someone, knowing Hanzo’s preference for clear and unobstructed lines of sight as he did -- had drawn the privacy curtain around the bed but left a single segment of lighting on over the wall full of monitors opposite, so it wasn’t completely dark. Moving as slowly and carefully and quietly as the combination of the floor and his boots allowed, Jesse crept up alongside the bed and twitched the curtain back. Hanzo was, indeed, asleep -- really, most sincerely asleep, because under any other circumstance the curtain sliding alone would likely have woken him. He was mostly dressed for action, though his glove was off, his bow and quiver propped in easy reach and a selection of cutlery laid out on the bedside table, though his hair had escaped its ties and lay spread out over the pillow, across his brow, deepening the already deep shadows under his eyes. In his sleep, at least, he was at something comparable to actual peace, the lines of care at the corners of his eyes and between his brows smoothed away, his mouth set at a point resembling restful. Jesse sat on the edge of one of the medieval torture chairs and, for a moment, did nothing but watch the man he’d dragged from one side of the planet to the other sleep, counted his breaths, seriously considered leaving him there to catch up on his rest while he sallied forth to do something resembling battle on both their behalves. It was, in all likelihood, the very least he could do at this point. On the other hand, he wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to be anywhere in easy reach should Hanzo wake up and discover him wandering around the Watchpoint insufficiently guarded -- somewhere between _The Outlaw Josey Wales_ and _Unforgiven_ , Hanzo had heard the term ‘hog-tied’ and proceeded to study and then practice the form to mastery.

Hanzo shifted slightly and the illusion of peace cracked a bit -- his brows drew together and a little sound, not quite enough syllables to make a whole word, passed his lips and Jesse reached over, reflexively, and smoothed the strands of hair back from his face. Just a little bit, and his eyes snapped open at once, two shades darker than usual in the dim light and slightly unfocused and then he realized what he was looking at. 

“Hey, darlin’,” Jesse poured all the insouciant drawl he had to spare on the words and smiled his best reassuring smile. “I’m sorry I left you alone with my crazy-ass family for two whole days. I w -- “

Hanzo took the rest of the words out of his mouth, along with most of his breath; Jesse closed his eyes and held on, put an arm around his waist to hold him steady and stroked a soothing hand the length of his spine. When they parted, they were both more than a little breathless.

“My family,” Hanzo informed him, voice not entirely even, “would have been far less welcoming to you than yours has been to me.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Jesse bent and stole another kiss, and another, and then Hanzo was burying his face in his neck and pressing the last of the space from between their bodies. “I can be legitimately charming when I put my mind to it. This is where you yell at me for getting all distracted in the field and letting myself get jumped from behind by some smoke-monster reject from Saturday Cartoon Action Hour. Go ahead. Get it off your chest.”

“No,” Hanzo said, low-voiced, against his neck.

“Well, I can kinda understand and appreciate saving it for later. Doc Ziegler and Fareeha are still right across the way and I am absolutely sure one or both of ‘em has their ear pressed to the door.” His hand found its way into Hanzo’s hair, inky black shot through with threads of silver and iron gray, came to rest against his neck under the silken spill of it. “Hanzo. Darlin’. Look at me.”

If anything, his grip tightened, a tremor running through the taut line of his shoulders. Jesse decided that quiet was the better part of valor and just held him while he let out what he needed to, silently as had always been his wont. When he finally looked up, Jesse pressed kisses to his eyelids and to his cheeks and to both corners of his mouth and was rewarded with the faintest, wateriest smile, but a smile nonetheless. “Still here. Not going anywhere without you.”

“You nearly did.” Hanzo reached up and caught his face, held him in place with both hands and those beautiful eyes of his. “Do _not_ make light of this. That thing was trying to take you -- whether or not it meant to kill you, before or after. You _must_ be more careful.”

“As careful as I can be. Promise. Cross my heart.” He kissed both of Hanzo’s palms. “Speaking of things there ‘must’ be more of, I should make you go back to sleep. How many watches did you just sit straight through?”

Hanzo was silent for a moment. “...Four.”

“Yeah, I thought as much. Did Winston actually assign us quarters or have you just been haunting the infirmary to the exclusion of all other options?” Jesse leaned back and handed Hanzo his glove and then every single pointy-stabby thing he carried, one piece at a time.

“We _have_ been assigned a suite in the family housing block.” A rather more steady smile curled at the corners of his mouth. “I fear some of your colleagues may be slightly...traumatized.”

“They’ll get over it. C’mon.” He unlocked the door and punched it open, glancing both ways and finding the corridor satisfyingly unoccupied. “I need to -- “

“Excuse me, gentlemen.” The voice was richly accented, gorgeously feminine, and had the ineffably disturbing effect of seeming to come from everywhere at once, even though he knew it had to be emanating from the comm panels lining the walls of every room and corridor in the place.

“Good morning, Miss Athena, and how are you today?” Jesse replied, cordially, and just barely resisted the urge to tip his hat in greeting at their unseen interlocutor, her voice was just that nice.

“I am entirely well, Agent McCree, thank you.” He swore he could almost hear her smiling, not that she had an actual face or anything. “My apologies for this interruption, but Agent Shimada asked to be informed when his brother arrived. His transport just crossed into the Watchpoint’s airspace and should be landing within the next twenty minutes.”

“Well. Good thing I woke up when I did.” Jesse leaned against the doorframe and offered Hanzo his hand.

“Thank you, Lady Athena.” Hanzo visibly checked the urge to bow politely and accepted the hand; Jesse used it to reel him close.

“You okay, darlin’?” Jesse murmured, low and close enough against his ear for Athena’s audio ports not to pick it up. “Ready? It’s been a rough couple days, I know, and last time -- “

“I believe that our combined tempers have had adequate time to cool.” The corners of Hanzo’s mouth twitched, decidedly wry. “We will both be here for the foreseeable future. Avoiding him would be...childish, at best.” A sigh. “And he is my brother. My beloved, idiot brother.”

“And that right there is one of the many reasons I love you.” Jesse pulled them both out into the hall at a brisk walk. “Fastest way up top is this way, if I recall correctly -- I spent more time at the Blackwatch station across the way in Tripoli…”

The sun was definitely on the downward slide by the time they made it above ground and the official welcoming committee already stood assembled on the platform above the landing pad, Winston a mountain of armor gleaming in the late afternoon sun, his glasses perched almost daintily on his nose and Fareeha, nursing a mug of coffee in lieu of making sweet love to her pillow. Her eyes positively _twinkled_ when she caught sight of them walking together and, for a change, Jesse kept hold of Hanzo’s hand, didn’t let him drift off to back-watching distance, instead laced their fingers together and kept him as close as he would allow. Hanzo went a little still with it at first but then the tension bled out of the set of his shoulders and the tips of his fingers caressed the inside of Jesse’s palm in a way that felt more than a little like a promise. Fareeha, if anything, _twinkled even harder._

“Jesse,” Winston, who had his gaze turned upward in an effort to spot the transport on its approach and one enormous fingertip delicately pressed to the comm unit in his ear as he listened to whatever Athena was saying on the traffic control line, rumbled in completely oblivious greeting, “Good to see you again. And up and around, especially after the other night. How are you feeling?”

“Better than I was, thank you kindly.” Jesse found a genuine grin taking up residence on his face and let it stay. “And it’s good to see you again, too, big guy. I was about to come up to talk to you when Athena let us know Genji was almost here. Something about my arm?”

“And your neural interface implants. It’s been almost nine years since your last significant command and control upgrade.” A tilt-winged shape flickered into view overhead, its photoreactive skin shimmering as it transitioned out of its stealth scheme. “You’ve been taking fine care of the prosthesis, and Angela didn’t monitor any significant functionality shortfalls, but modifying one without the other will inevitably cause neuromechanical synch issues, sooner or later.”

“And I’m guessing you’ve got some spiffy new technology you’re just _itching_ for me to field test.” The downdraft from the plane’s VTOL engines washed across them where they stood as it descended smoothly between the communications tower and the exterior flank of the Watchpoint’s enormous research block.

Winston shot him the world’s toothiest grin. “Well -- yes. Would you mind?”

“Not at all.” The plane sat down as pretty as you please on the landing pad, its engines cycling down to less than a whisper in a matter of minutes. “Provided you can do it without Doc Ziegler shaving my head, because that is never happening again.”

“We might be able to arrange a minimally invasive procedure through transorbital endoscopy,” Winston scratched his chin, thoughtfully. “After all, this time we wouldn’t be inserting an entire new implant and with the assistance of a therapeutic nanocolony...I’ll have to think a bit and consult Angela. If you don’t mind.”

“Think all you like, my brain’ll thank you later.” The plane’s sidelock cycled and the boarding stairs dropped out of the undercarriage.

The first one down the stairs was, from where Jesse stood, possibly the tiniest girl he had ever seen, and he was close personal friends with Lena Oxton, who could accurately be assessed as a pixie. “Winston, please tell me we aren’t actually recruiting twelve year olds.”

“Oh, no. No. That’s Mei -- Dr. Zhou Mei-Ling.” Winston raised one enormous hand and waved in a manner Jesse was frankly inclined to diagnose as damn near bashful. “She was with the Science Division before the dissolution -- the Advanced Environmental Projects team, as a matter of fact.” His voice dropped to as close to an undertone as it ever got. “A survey team searching for reachable oil deposits found her in cryostasis in what was left of Watchpoint Antarctica a few years ago. She’s been in and out of here a few times since -- I honestly wasn’t certain she’d come back, her primary area of expertise is environmental impact mitigation.” 

Jesse flicked a glance at Fareeha; she mouthed _he has it so bad, you have NO IDEA_ and descended the stairs to help the incredibly tiny Dr. Zhou haul her gear across the tarmac and up the stairs. Incredibly tiny and sugar-sweet, because she met Winston with an enthusiastically whole-body hug that was _instantly_ charming. “Thank you for inviting me back, Winston -- I was worried you wouldn’t have enough room.”

If Winston could blush he’d be red from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes. “Dr. Zhou, this will always be your home if you want it to be.” And now _she_ was getting all pink in the cheeks and Jesse could just _feel_ himself developing diabetes from how goddamned _adorable_ it was. “I’d like you to meet Agent Jesse McCree and Agent Hanzo Shimada -- they arrived just a few days ago themselves.“ 

Jesse tipped his hat. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Doc.”

Hanzo bowed flawlessly from the shoulders.

“I think I remember you from one of the posters,” Dr. Zhou smiled up at him, a definitely puckish gleam in her eyes.

“You might,” Jesse admitted, and avoided catching the look Hanzo threw at the side of his head. “In my defense, I was very young and very drunk when I agreed to do that.”

“And still old and sober enough to probably know better,” Fareeha remarked, her own smile approximately two hundred percent semi-malicious amusement.

“I seem to recall that you _had_ that poster and didn’t part with it until you went away to boarding school in Luzerne.” Jesse pointed out, aggrieved, and she laughed, so much like her mother in that moment it was almost physically painful.

“Yes, but I _wasn’t_ old enough to know better.” Fareeha grinned. “Come on, Mei -- we’ve still got enough room for you to pick your own quarters. And you might even have enough time to grab a shower and a nap before supper.”

The even-more-pixieish-than-Lena Dr. Zhou was clearly hiding some muscle under that heavy coat she was wearing, because she hauled almost twice as much baggage as Fareeha (“I hope you don’t mind, but some of the things I packed are _very delicate_ , and I feel much safer handling them myself!”) without breaking a sweat or slowing down, the two trotting off quickly in pursuit of hot water and someplace horizontal to rest for a while. Jesse watched them go, bemused, and turned back to the plane only just in time to catch the barest flicker of sun-struck silver out of the corner of his eye. “Oh, damn.”

He grabbed Hanzo by the shoulders and swung him firmly out of the way -- practically into Winston’s chest -- and put his own back against the mountain of empty shipping containers stacked on the loading platform awaiting the next UN-authorized resupply run. Hanzo’s hand was creeping in the direction of his bow; Jesse waved him down and got a flesh-peeling interrogatory glare for his trouble. Jesse signed _watch_ and brought a finger to his lips; Hanzo’s eyes narrowed a fraction, his fingers asking _what for_ in reply -- and then his gaze flicked upwards and the fraction widened back up. Jesse grinned his very best _don’t worry, darlin’, I know exactly what I’m doing_ grin at him, took hold of the edge of the tarp dangling over the edge of the containers, set his feet, and yanked with all his strength. Weight resistance lasted only a second, which was all it took for Young Master Faster-and-Stealthier Than You And By the Way I Always Have Perfect Balance to execute something no doubt impressively acrobatic to judge from the looks on Hanzo and Winston and land less than an arm’s length away, all sleekly armored and light on his feet and ready to zip away in a heartbeat.

A heartbeat Jesse used to lean forward and poke him between his armored shoulder-blades. “You’re it.”

Genji Shimada laughed and in that very instant Jesse McCree knew he was _home_ and this _was_ his family, no matter how much he’d wanted to keep them on the fringes of his personal disaster, and that they were all magnificently screwed because now they’d never let him go again. And then Genji was all-but lifting him off his feet with the enthusiasm of his hug. “You are _here_.”

“You know me, kid,” Jesse wheezed from around a substantial amount of pressure being energetically applied to his ribs. “Just can’t stay away from trouble.”

“....And you brought my brother with you.” It was not a question, though it technically qualified as a whisper. “ _How_.”

“It was kinda _his_ idea.” The sound that came out of Genji was almost not human. “Go on, get your brotherly ninj on, I need to catch my breath.”

Genji practically _bounded_ the distance between himself and Hanzo in a manner not entirely without some resemblance to the world’s happiest cyborg puppy, coming to a halt just far enough away to execute the sort of flawless bow that acknowledged both his brother’s dignity and his own. Then he bounded the rest of the way and wrapped said brother up in another of his ribcage-crushing hugs; for an instant, it didn’t look like Hanzo knew what to do with his hands, and then they came to rest on Genji’s back, his chin on his little brother’s shoulder, and he murmured something too low for Jesse to hear that made Genji laugh again. He set Hanzo back on his feet and together they drifted off a bit, still talking quietly, and Jesse found a goofy smile crawling across his face as they did so, strolling over to join Winston.

“I never thought I’d see _that_ ,” Winston admitted, eyes wide but with a genuine smile curling his mouth. “Dare I ask how it came about?”

“It’s a long story, not entirely mine.” He glanced at the plane, its boarding stairs still down. “Who’s -- “

The answer to his half-articulated question floated -- literally floated -- out of sidelock, the stairs sliding back and the door cycling closed as it -- he? She? Hard to tell -- did so. Like Genji, the sun glinted off the curves of the head and shoulders, the slim lines of the upper chassis and limbs, and the ellipse of silver-and-gold patterned spheres orbiting his neck like a solar system in miniature, something about the whole shape subtly masculine.

“Is that who I think it is?” Jesse asked in an undertone. Then, “Wait, was he the _pilot_?”

“Tekhartha Zenyatta.” Winston nodded. “And, yes. We needed another pilot, Lena can’t be _everywhere_.”

“You gave the source of Genji’s ongoing state of zen flight clearance but not _me_.” Jesse clutched his heart in mock-agony.

“The fact that he can just interface with the flight control systems of every vehicle we have makes instrument flying that much easier, and safer, for everyone concerned.” In an undertone, “And you still hold the all-organization record for unforced and non-deliberate crashes leading to the total destruction of the vehicle on the flight simulator.”

“The things I’ll never live down, I swear.”

“Tekhartha,” Winston said it like it was a title rather than a name. “Welcome back. I hope everything went smoothly?”

“Entirely,” Tekhartha Zenyatta did not have the voice of a machine -- it was too damn _warm_ for that. “And it is good to be here again. My student has been restless in his desire to rejoin his family.” The smile was right there, clearly audible, despite the immobile faceplate that allowed for no such niceties of expression. “I will also confess a desire to meet more of it, as well. He has told me so much of all of you.”

“You’re in luck then, Padre, because it looks like the lost sheep are on their way back to the fold.” Jesse offered a hand and found it enveloped in both of the monk’s, a sensation not entirely unlike a static charge running the length of his prosthesis at the contact, and all of his spheres chimed a single ringing note, one of them spinning off to orbit his own head, its surface flickering with data strings too fast for human eyes to read. “Um.”

“My apologies.” The sphere stopped what it was doing with a minor-key tone that sounded almost apologetic, and returned to its place, dimming down as it went. “They are not normally so...outgoing in their behavior towards others, though I suspect it was motivated by concern. You were injured recently?”

“A little bit, yeah.” Jesse took his hand back, metal fingers still tingling in a way not entirely unfamiliar, or exactly unpleasant. “Couldn’t just head out without getting in a fight, that sort of thing.”

Tekhartha Zenyatta hummed at him in a manner that suggested he was already intimately familiar with the Overwatch style of understatement. “You must be Jesse. My student has spoken of you, at length.” Somehow, his voice got even warmer. “For many years I have wished to thank you for the care you gave to my student, when he did not care for himself.”

And then he bowed over his hands; Jesse felt himself blushing to the second time in one day, which had to be some kind of new record all by itself. “Damn, Padre, that’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me all day.”

He got the very distinct sensation that he was being smiled at again. “And that must be Hanzo.”

Jesse glanced over and found the brothers Shimada still deep in conversation, Hanzo with his back to them, a subtle tension in the set of his spine and his shoulders that wasn’t anger or aggression, Genji listening with his head tilted in the curious little bird posture he used when he was listening intently, in lieu of an actual expression. “Yep, that’s him. A word of advice, one dragon-wrangler to another?”

“Of course?” The Tekhartha’s voice lilted slightly upwards at the end, making it into a question.

“Hanzo needs to come to things his own way, in his own time. He and Genji aren’t much different that way -- goddamned stubborn to the bone and you can’t tell either of them something they don’t want to hear. You wanna help them work it out, just keep that in mind.” Jesse gave the monk’s knee a pat, floating as it was at convenient patting altitude. “C’mon, we’d better collect ‘em before something goes horribly wrong.”

Nothing went horribly wrong in the length of time it took them to reach the pair which, considering that they were both armed and Hanzo was actually _talking with this hands_ , seemed vaguely miraculous. Genji saw them coming and rested a hand on his brother’s shoulder; Hanzo bit off whatever he was about to say in mid-word and glanced back at them, the set of his mouth decidedly grim.

“Sorry to interrupt the reunion, but I do believe I have a promise to keep.” Jesse rested a hand in the small of Hanzo’s back. “Namely, the one about getting settled. And getting in touch with our client?”

“Already done,” Hanzo replied and leaned subtly into his touch. “She seemed _enormously_ satisfied. It was exceedingly gratifying, considering all the trouble that came about as a result.”

“...How hard are we wanted in Macau?” Jesse asked, a certain sharp pain started behind his left eye.

“Those alternate identities should, in all likelihood, wait a decade or two or possibly forever before attempting to visit the city again,” Hanzo admitted evenly. “On the other hand, it seems that the late Ts’ong Ju-zheng was involved in far, far more than merely facilitating human trafficking.”

“Oh?” Jesse asked, inclining a brow.

“Lady Athena is still analyzing the copy of the information that I retained for our edification -- but, at the moment, it seems as though he was also a link in the funding chain for several terrorist cells active in the region.” A pause. “ _Talon_ cells, Jesse.”

“Fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” Jesse breathed. “Are you kidding me?”

Hanzo dispensed his very best _this face has never once kidded in the entire history of time_ look. “No.”

“ _What_ have you two been _doing_?” Genji asked, halfway between impressed and appalled.

“That’s a long story, one we’ll tell on the way upstairs to the barracks -- because this brother of yours has been awake for forty-four of the last forty-eight hours.” Jesse firmed up his hold and started to move, forcing Hanzo to do likewise or be dragged along whether he wanted to go or not. “A very productive forty-four hours, but -- “

“ _His_ skull is fractured in three places,” Hanzo retaliated airily. “And it is being held together at this moment by nanites and stubbornness.”

“And we have obviously arrived just in time.” Genji replied, and Jesse could hear the crazy-happy grin in his voice as clear as it ever was. “Tell on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The thing in Mombasa was completely Jesse's fault.
> 
> Incoming POV shift in the next chapter, because if you thought Hanzo wasn't quite done asking questions, you were correct!
> 
> Random fic-related thoughts can be found here: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/companerosdearmas


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